I have said enough to show your Holiness the injustice
into which you fall in classing us, who in seeking
virtually to abolish private property in land seek more
fully to secure the true rights of property, with those
whom you speak of as socialists, who wish to make all
property common. But you also do injustice to the
socialists.
There are many, it is true, who feeling bitterly the
monstrous wrongs of the present distribution of wealth
are animated only by a blind hatred of the rich and a
fierce desire to destroy existing social adjustments.
This class is indeed only less dangerous than those who
proclaim that no social improvement is needed or is
possible. But it is not fair to confound with them those
who, however mistakenly, propose definite schemes of
remedy.
The socialists, as I understand them, and as the term
has come to apply to anything like a definite theory and
not to be vaguely and improperly used to include all who
desire social improvement, do not, as you imply, seek the
abolition of all private property. Those who do this are
properly called communists. What the socialists seek is
the state assumption of capital (in which they vaguely
and erroneously include land), or more properly speaking,
of large capitals, and state management and direction of
at least the larger operations of industry. In this way
they hope to abolish interest, which they regard as a
wrong and an evil; to do away with the gains of
exchangers, speculators, contractors and middlemen, which
they regard as waste; to do away with the wage system and
secure general cooperation; and to prevent competition,
which they deem the fundamental cause of the
impoverishment of labor. The more moderate of them,
without going so far, go in the same direction, and seek
some remedy or palliation of the worst forms of poverty
by government regulation. The essential character of
socialism is that it looks to the extension of the
functions of the state for the remedy of social evils;
that it would substitute regulation and direction for
competition; and intelligent control by organized society
for the free play of individual desire and effort.
Though not usually classed as socialists, both the
trades-unionists and the protectionists have the same
essential character. The trades-unionists seek the
increase of wages, the reduction of working-hours and the
general improvement in the condition of wage-workers, by
organizing them into guilds or associations which shall
fix the rates at which they will sell their labor; shall
deal as one body with employers in case of dispute; shall
use on occasion their necessary weapon, the strike; and
shall accumulate funds for such purposes and for the
purpose of assisting members when on a strike, or
(sometimes) when out of employment. The protectionists
seek by governmental prohibitions or taxes on imports to
regulate the industry and control the exchanges of each
country, so as, they imagine, to diversify home
industries and prevent the competition of people of other
countries.
At the opposite extreme are the
anarchists, a term which, though
frequently applied to mere violent destructionists,
refers also to those who, seeing the many evils of too
much government, regard government in itself as evil, and
believe that in the absence of coercive power the mutual
interests of men would secure voluntarily what
cooperation is needed.
Differing from all these are those for whom I would
speak. Believing that the rights of true property are
sacred, we would regard forcible communism as robbery
that would bring destruction. But we would not be
disposed to deny that voluntary communism might be the
highest possible state of which men can conceive. Nor do
we say that it cannot be possible for mankind to attain
it, since among the early Christians and among the
religious orders of the Catholic Church we have examples
of communistic societies on a small scale. St. Peter and
St. Paul, St. Thomas of Aquin and Fra Angelico, the
illustrious orders of the Carmelites and Franciscans, the
Jesuits, whose heroism carried the cross among the most
savage tribes of American forests, the societies that
wherever your communion is known have deemed no work of
mercy too dangerous or too repellent — were or are
communists. Knowing these things we cannot take it on
ourselves to say that a social condition may not be
possible in which an all-embracing love shall have taken
the place of all other motives. But we see that communism
is only possible where there exists a general and intense
religious faith, and we see that such a state can be
reached only through a state of justice. For before a man
can be a saint he must first be an honest man.
With both anarchists and socialists, we, who
for want of a better term have come to call ourselves
single-tax men, fundamentally differ. We regard them as
erring in opposite directions — the one in ignoring
the social nature of man, the other in ignoring his
individual nature. While we see that man is
primarily an individual, and that nothing but evil has
come or can come from the interference by the state with
things that belong to individual action, we also see that
he is a social being, or, as Aristotle called him, a
political animal, and that the state is requisite to
social advance, having an indispensable place in the
natural order. Looking on the bodily organism as the
analogue of the social organism, and on the proper
functions of the state as akin to those that in the human
organism are discharged by the conscious intelligence,
while the play of individual impulse and interest
performs functions akin to those discharged in the bodily
organism by the unconscious instincts and involuntary
motions, the anarchists seem to us like men who would try
to get along without heads and the socialists like men
who would try to rule the wonderfully complex and
delicate internal relations of their frames by conscious
will.
The philosophical anarchists of whom I speak
are few in number, and of little practical importance. It
is with socialism in its various phases that we have to
do battle.... read the whole
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