You assume that the labor question is a question
between wage-workers and their employers. But working for
wages is not the primary or exclusive occupation of
labor. Primarily men work for themselves without the
intervention of an employer. And the primary source of
wages is in the earnings of labor, the man who works for
himself and consumes his own products receiving his wages
in the fruits of his labor. Are not fishermen, boatmen,
cab-drivers, peddlers, working farmers — all, in
short, of the many workers who get their wages directly
by the sale of their services or products without the
medium of an employer, as much laborers as those who work
for the specific wages of an employer? In your
consideration of remedies you do not seem even to have
thought of them. Yet in reality the laborers who work for
themselves are the first to be considered, since what men
will be willing to accept from employers depends
manifestly on what they can get by working for
themselves.
You assume that all employers are rich men, who might
raise wages much higher were they not so grasping. But is
it not the fact that the great majority of employers are
in reality as much pressed by competition as their
workmen, many of them constantly on the verge of failure?
Such employers could not possibly raise the wages they
pay, however they might wish to, unless all others were
compelled to do so.
You assume that there are in the natural order
two classes, the rich and the poor, and that laborers
naturally belong to the poor.
It is true as you say that there are differences in
capacity, in diligence, in health and in strength, that
may produce differences in fortune. These, however, are
not the differences that divide men into rich and poor.
The natural differences in powers and aptitudes are
certainly not greater than are natural differences in
stature. But while it is only by selecting giants and
dwarfs that we can find men twice as tall as others, yet
in the difference between rich and poor that exists today
we find some men richer than other men by the
thousandfold and the millionfold.
Nowhere do these differences between wealth and
poverty coincide with differences in individual powers
and aptitudes. The real difference between rich
and poor is the difference between those who hold the
tollgates and those who pay toll; between
tribute-receivers and tribute-yielders. ...
It seems to us that your Holiness misses its real
significance in intimating that Christ, in becoming the
son of a carpenter and himself working as a carpenter,
showed merely that “there is nothing to be ashamed
of in seeking one’s bread by labor.” To say
that is almost like saying that by not robbing people he
showed that there is nothing to be ashamed of in honesty.
If you will consider how true in any large view is the
classification of all men into working-men, beggar-men
and thieves, you will see that it was morally impossible
that Christ during his stay on earth should have been
anything else than a working-man, since he who came to
fulfil the law must by deed as well as word obey
God’s law of labor.
See how fully and how beautifully Christ’s life
on earth illustrated this law. Entering our earthly life
in the weakness of infancy, as it is appointed that all
should enter it, he lovingly took what in the natural
order is lovingly rendered, the sustenance, secured by
labor, that one generation owes to its immediate
successors. Arrived at maturity, he earned his own
subsistence by that common labor in which the majority of
men must and do earn it. Then passing to a higher —
to the very highest — sphere of labor, he earned
his subsistence by the teaching of moral and spiritual
truths, receiving its material wages in the
love-offerings of grateful hearers, and not refusing the
costly spikenard with which Mary anointed his feet. So,
when he chose his disciples, he did not go to landowners
or other monopolists who live on the labor of others, but
to common laboring-men. And when he called them to a
higher sphere of labor and sent them out to teach moral
and spiritual truths, he told them to take, without
condescension on the one hand or sense of degradation on
the other, the loving return for such labor, saying to
them that “the laborer is worthy of his
hire,” thus showing, what we hold, that all labor
does not consist in what is called manual labor, but that
whoever helps to add to the material, intellectual, moral
or spiritual fullness of life is also a laborer.*
* Nor should it be forgotten that the investigator,
the philosopher, the teacher, the artist, the poet, the
priest, though not engaged in the production of wealth,
are not only engaged in the production of utilities and
satisfactions to which the production of wealth is only
a means, but by acquiring and diffusing knowledge,
stimulating mental powers and elevating the moral
sense, may greatly increase the ability to produce
wealth. For man does not live by bread alone. . . . He
who by any exertion of mind or body adds to the
aggregate of enjoyable wealth, increases the sum of
human knowledge, or gives to human life higher
elevation or greater fullness — he is, in the
large meaning of the words, a “producer,” a
“working-man,” a “laborer,” and
is honestly earning honest wages. But he who without
doing aught to make mankind richer, wiser, better,
happier, lives on the toil of others — he, no
matter by what name of honor he may be called, or how
lustily the priests of Mammon may swing their censers
before him, is in the last analysis but a beggar-man or
a thief. — Protection or Free Trade, pp.
74-75.
In assuming that laborers, even ordinary manual
laborers, are naturally poor, you ignore the fact that
labor is the producer of wealth, and attribute to the
natural law of the Creator an injustice that comes from
man’s impious violation of his benevolent
intention. In the rudest stage of the arts it is
possible, where justice prevails, for all well men to
earn a living. With the labor-saving appliances of our
time, it should be possible for all to earn much more.
And so, in saying that poverty is no disgrace, you convey
an unreasonable implication. For poverty ought to be a
disgrace, since in a condition of social justice, it
would, where unsought from religious motives or unimposed
by unavoidable misfortune, imply recklessness or
laziness. ... read the whole
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