To persist in a wrong, to refuse to undo it, is always
to become involved in other wrongs. Those who defend
private property in land, and thereby deny the first and
most important of all human rights, the equal right to
the material substratum of life, are compelled to one of
two courses. Either they must, as do those whose gospel
is “Devil take the hindermost,” deny the
equal right to life, and by some theory like that to
which the English clergyman Malthus has given his name,
assert that nature (they do not venture to say God)
brings into the world more men than there is provision
for; or, they must, as do the socialists, assert as
rights what in themselves are wrongs.
Your Holiness in the Encyclical gives an example of
this. Denying the equality of right to the
material basis of life, and yet conscious that there is a
right to live, you assert the right of laborers to
employment and their right to receive from their
employers a certain indefinite wage. No such rights
exist. No one has a right to demand employment of
another, or to demand higher wages than the other is
willing to give, or in any way to put pressure on another
to make him raise such wages against his will.
There can be no better moral justification for such
demands on employers by working-men than there would be
for employers demanding that working-men shall be
compelled to work for them when they do not want to and
to accept wages lower than they are willing to take. Any
seeming justification springs from a prior wrong, the
denial to working-men of their natural rights, and can in
the last analysis rest only on that supreme dictate of
self-preservation that under extraordinary circumstances
makes pardonable what in itself is theft, or sacrilege or
even murder.
A fugitive slave with the bloodhounds of his pursuers
baying at his heels would in true Christian morals be
held blameless if he seized the first horse he came
across, even though to take it he had to knock down the
rider. But this is not to justify horse-stealing as an
ordinary means of traveling.
When his disciples were hungry Christ permitted them
to pluck corn on the Sabbath day. But he never denied the
sanctity of the Sabbath by asserting that it was under
ordinary circumstances a proper time to gather corn.
He justified David, who when pressed by hunger
committed what ordinarily would be sacrilege, by taking
from the temple the loaves of proposition. But in this he
was far from saying that the robbing of temples was a
proper way of getting a living.
In the Encyclical however you commend the application
to the ordinary relations of life, under normal
conditions, of principles that in ethics are only to be
tolerated under extraordinary conditions. You are driven
to this assertion of false rights by your denial of true
rights. The natural right which each man has is not that
of demanding employment or wages from another man; but
that of employing himself — that of applying by his
own labor to the inexhaustible storehouse which the
Creator has in the land provided for all men.
Were that storehouse open, as by the single tax
we would open it, the natural demand for labor would keep
pace with the supply, the man who sold labor and the man
who bought it would become free exchangers for mutual
advantage, and all cause for dispute between workman and
employer would be gone. For then, all being free to
employ themselves, the mere opportunity to labor would
cease to seem a boon; and since no one would work for
another for less, all things considered, than he could
earn by working for himself, wages would necessarily rise
to their full value, and the relations of workman and
employer be regulated by mutual interest and
convenience.
This is the only way in which they can be
satisfactorily regulated.
Your Holiness seems to assume that there is some just
rate of wages that employers ought to be willing to pay
and that laborers should be content to receive, and to
imagine that if this were secured there would be an end
of strife. This rate you evidently think of as that which
will give working-men a frugal living, and perhaps enable
them by hard work and strict economy to lay by a little
something.
But how can a just rate of wages be fixed without the
“higgling of the market” any more than the
just price of corn or pigs or ships or paintings can be
so fixed? And would not arbitrary regulation in the one
case as in the other check that interplay that most
effectively promotes the economical adjustment of
productive forces? Why should buyers of labor, any more
than buyers of commodities, be called on to pay higher
prices than in a free market they are compelled to pay?
Why should the sellers of labor be content with anything
less than in a free market they can obtain? Why should
working-men be content with frugal fare when the world is
so rich? Why should they be satisfied with a lifetime of
toil and stinting, when the world is so beautiful? Why
should not they also desire to gratify the higher
instincts, the finer tastes? Why should they be forever
content to travel in the steerage when others find the
cabin more enjoyable? ... read the whole
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