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. ...
I have already referred generally to the defects that
attach to all socialistic remedies for the evil condition
of labor, but respect for your Holiness dictates that I
should speak specifically, even though briefly, of the
remedies proposed or suggested by you.
Of these, the widest and strongest are that the state
should restrict the hours of labor, the employment of
women and children, the unsanitary conditions of
workshops, etc. Yet how little may in this way be
accomplished.
A strong, absolute ruler might hope by such
regulations to alleviate the conditions of chattel
slaves. But the tendency of our times is toward
democracy, and democratic states are necessarily weaker
in paternalism, while in the industrial slavery, growing
out of private ownership of land, that prevails in
Christendom today, it is not the master who forces the
slave to labor, but the slave who urges the master to let
him labor. Thus the greatest difficulty in enforcing such
regulations comes from those whom they are intended to
benefit. It is not, for instance, the masters who make it
difficult to enforce restrictions on child labor in
factories, but the mothers, who, prompted by poverty,
misrepresent the ages of their children even to the
masters, and teach the children to misrepresent.
But while in large factories and mines regulations as
to hours, ages, etc., though subject to evasion and
offering opportunities for extortion and corruption, may
be to some extent enforced, how can they have any effect
in those far wider branches of industry where the laborer
works for himself or for small employers?
All such remedies are of the nature of the remedy for
overcrowding that is generally prescribed with them
— the restriction under penalty of the number who
may occupy a room and the demolition of unsanitary
buildings. Since these measures have no tendency to
increase house accommodation or to augment ability to pay
for it, the overcrowding that is forced back in some
places goes on in other places and to a worse degree. All
such remedies begin at the wrong end. They are like
putting on brake and bit to hold in quietness horses that
are being lashed into frenzy; they are like trying to
stop a locomotive by holding its wheels instead of
shutting off steam; like attempting to cure smallpox by
driving back its pustules. Men do not overwork themselves
because they like it; it is not in the nature of the
mother’s heart to send children to work when they
ought to be at play; it is not of choice that laborers
will work under dangerous and unsanitary conditions.
These things, like overcrowding, come from the sting of
poverty. And so long as the poverty of which they are the
expression is left untouched, restrictions such as you
indorse can have only partial and evanescent results. The
cause remaining, repression in one place can only bring
out its effects in other places, and the task you assign
to the state is as hopeless as to ask it to lower the
level of the ocean by bailing out the sea.
Nor can the state cure poverty by regulating wages. It
is as much beyond the power of the state to regulate
wages as it is to regulate the rates of interest. Usury
laws have been tried again and again, but the only effect
they have ever had has been to increase what the poorer
borrowers must pay, and for the same reasons that all
attempts to lower by regulation the price of goods have
always resulted merely in increasing them. The general
rate of wages is fixed by the ease or difficulty with
which labor can obtain access to land, ranging from the
full earnings of labor, where land is free, to the least
on which laborers can live and reproduce, where land is
fully monopolized. Thus, where it has been comparatively
easy for laborers to get land, as in the United States
and in Australasia, wages have been higher than in Europe
and it has been impossible to get European laborers to
work there for wages that they would gladly accept at
home; while as monopolization goes on under the influence
of private property in land, wages tend to fall, and the
social conditions of Europe to appear. Thus, under the
partial yet substantial recognition of common rights to
land, of which I have spoken, the many attempts of the
British Parliament to reduce wages by regulation failed
utterly. And so, when the institution of private property
in land had done its work in England, all attempts of
Parliament to raise wages proved unavailing. In the
beginning of this century it was even attempted to
increase the earnings of laborers by grants in aid of
wages. But the only result was to lower commensurately
what wages employers paid.
The state could maintain wages above the tendency of
the market (for as I have shown labor deprived of land
becomes a commodity), only by offering employment to all
who wish it; or by lending its sanction to strikes and
supporting them with its funds. Thus it is, that the
thoroughgoing socialists who want the state to take all
industry into its hands are much more logical than those
timid socialists who propose that the state should
regulate private industry — but only a little.
The same hopelessness attends your suggestion that
working-people should be encouraged by the state in
obtaining a share of the land. It is evident that by this
you mean that, as is now being attempted in Ireland, the
state shall buy out large landowners in favor of small
ones, establishing what are known as peasant proprietors.
Supposing that this can be done even to a considerable
extent, what will be accomplished save to substitute a
larger privileged class for a smaller privileged class?
What will be done for the still larger class that must
remain, the laborers of the agricultural districts, the
workmen of the towns, the proletarians of the cities? Is
it not true, as Professor De Laveleye says, that in such
countries as Belgium, where peasant proprietary exists,
the tenants, for there still exist tenants, are
rack-rented with a mercilessness unknown in Ireland? Is
it not true that in such countries as Belgium the
condition of the mere laborer is even worse than it is in
Great Britain, where large ownerships obtain? And if the
state attempts to buy up land for peasant proprietors
will not the effect be, what is seen today in Ireland, to
increase the market value of land and thus make it more
difficult for those not so favored, and for those who
will come after, to get land? How, moreover, on the
principle which you declare (36), that “to the
state the interests of all are equal, whether high or
low,” will you justify state aid to one man to buy
a bit of land without also insisting on state aid to
another man to buy a donkey, to another to buy a shop, to
another to buy the tools and materials of a trade —
state aid in short to everybody who may be able to make
good use of it or thinks that he could? And are
you not thus landed in communism — not the
communism of the early Christians and of the religious
orders, but communism that uses the coercive power of the
state to take rightful property by force from those who
have, to give to those who have not? For the
state has no purse of Fortunatus; the state cannot repeat
the miracle of the loaves and fishes; all that the state
can give, it must get by some form or other of the taxing
power. And whether it gives or lends money, or gives or
lends credit, it cannot give to those who have not,
without taking from those who have.
But aside from all this, any scheme of dividing up
land while maintaining private property in land is
futile. Small holdings cannot coexist with the treatment
of land as private property where civilization is
materially advancing and wealth augments. We may see this
in the economic tendencies that in ancient times were the
main cause that transformed world-conquering Italy from a
land of small farms to a land of great estates. We may
see it in the fact that while two centuries ago the
majority of English farmers were owners of the land they
tilled, tenancy has been for a long time the all but
universal condition of the English farmer. And now the
mighty forces of steam and electricity have come to urge
concentration. It is in the United States that we may see
on the largest scale how their power is operating to turn
a nation of landowners into a nation of tenants. The
principle is clear and irresistible. Material progress
makes land more valuable, and when this increasing value
is left to private owners land must pass from the
ownership of the poor into the ownership of the rich,
just as diamonds so pass when poor men find them. What
the British government is attempting in Ireland is to
build snow-houses in the Arabian desert! to plant bananas
in Labrador!
There is one way, and only one way, in which
working-people in our civilization may be secured a share
in the land of their country, and that is the way that we
propose — the taking of the profits of
landownership for the community. ... read the whole
letter