Your use, in so many passages of your Encyclical, of
the inclusive term “property” or
“private” property, of which in morals
nothing can be either affirmed or denied, makes your
meaning, if we take isolated sentences, in many places
ambiguous. But reading it as a whole, there can be no
doubt of your intention that private property in land
shall be understood when you speak merely of private
property. With this interpretation, I find that the
reasons you urge for private property in land are eight.
Let us consider them in order of presentation. You
urge:
1. That what is bought with rightful property is
rightful property. (RN, paragraph 5) ...
2. That private property in land proceeds from
man’s gift of reason. (RN, paragraphs 6-7.)
...
3. That private property in land deprives no one of the
use of land. (RN, paragraph 8.) ...
4. That Industry expended on land gives ownership in the
land itself. (RN, paragraphs 9-10.) ...
5. That private property in land has the support of the
common opinion of mankind, and has conduced to peace and
tranquillity, and that it is sanctioned by Divine Law.
(RN, paragraph 11.) ...
6. That fathers should provide for their children and
that private property in land is necessary to enable them
to do so. (RN, paragraphs 14-17.) ...
7. That the private ownership of land stimulates
industry, increases wealth, and attaches men to the soil
and to their country. (RN, paragraph 51.) ...
8. That the right to possess private property in land is
from nature, not from man; that the state has no right to
abolish it, and that to take the value of landownership
in taxation would be unjust and cruel to the private
owner. (RN, paragraph 51.) ...
6. That fathers should provide for their
children and that private property in land is necessary
to enable them to do so. (14-17.)
With all that your Holiness has to say of the
sacredness of the family relation we are in full accord.
But how the obligation of the father to the child can
justify private property in land we cannot see. You
reason that private property in land is necessary to the
discharge of the duty of the father, and is therefore
requisite and just, because —
It is a most sacred law of nature that a father must
provide food and all necessaries for those whom he has
begotten; and, similarly, nature dictates that a
man’s children, who carry on, as it were, and
continue his own personality, should be provided by him
with all that is needful to enable them honorably to
keep themselves from want and misery in the
uncertainties of this mortal life. Now, in no other way
can a father effect this except by the ownership of
profitable property, which he can transmit to his
children by inheritance. (14.)
Thanks to Him who has bound the generations of
men together by a provision that brings the tenderest
love to greet our entrance into the world and soothes our
exit with filial piety, it is both the duty and the joy
of the father to care for the child till its powers
mature, and afterwards in the natural order it becomes
the duty and privilege of the child to be the stay of the
parent. This is the natural reason for that relation of
marriage, the groundwork of the sweetest, tenderest and
purest of human joys, which the Catholic Church has
guarded with such unremitting vigilance.
We do, for a few years, need the providence of
our fathers after the flesh. But how small, how
transient, how narrow is this need, as compared with our
constant need for the providence of Him in whom we live,
move and have our being — Our Father who art in
Heaven! It is to him, “the giver of every good and
perfect gift,” and not to our fathers after the
flesh, that Christ taught us to pray, “Give us this
day our daily bread.” And how true it is that it is
through him that the generations of men exist! Let the
mean temperature of the earth rise or fall a few degrees,
an amount as nothing compared with differences produced
in our laboratories, and mankind would disappear as ice
disappears under a tropical sun, would fall as the leaves
fall at the touch of frost. Or, let for two or three
seasons the earth refuse her increase, and how many of
our millions would remain alive?
The duty of fathers to transmit to their
children profitable property that will enable them to
keep themselves from want and misery in the uncertainties
of this mortal life! What is not possible cannot be a
duty. And how is it possible for fathers to do
that? Your Holiness has not considered how
mankind really lives from hand to mouth, getting each day
its daily bread; how little one generation does or can
leave another. It is doubtful if the wealth of the
civilized world all told amounts to anything like as much
as one year’s labor, while it is certain that if
labor were to stop and men had to rely on existing
accumulation, it would be only a few days ere in the
richest countries pestilence and famine would stalk.
The profitable property your Holiness refers to, is
private property in land. Now profitable land, as all
economists will agree, is land superior to the land that
the ordinary man can get. It is land that will yield an
income to the owner as owner, and therefore that will
permit the owner to appropriate the products of labor
without doing labor, its profitableness to the individual
involving the robbery of other individuals. It is
therefore possible only for some fathers to leave their
children profitable land. What therefore your
Holiness practically declares is, that it is the duty of
all fathers to struggle to leave their children what only
the few peculiarly strong, lucky or unscrupulous can
leave; and that, a something that involves the robbery of
others — their deprivation of the material gifts of
God.
This anti-Christian doctrine has been long in practice
throughout the Christian world. What are its results?
Are they not the very evils set forth in your
Encyclical? Are they not, so far from enabling men to
keep themselves from want and misery in the uncertainties
of this mortal life, to condemn the great masses of men
to want and misery that the natural conditions of our
mortal life do not entail; to want and misery deeper and
more wide-spread than exist among heathen savages?
Under the régime of private property in land
and in the richest countries not five per cent of fathers
are able at their death to leave anything substantial to
their children, and probably a large majority do not
leave enough to bury them! Some few children are left by
their fathers richer than it is good for them to be, but
the vast majority not only are left nothing by their
fathers, but by the system that makes land private
property are deprived of the bounty of their Heavenly
Father; are compelled to sue others for permission to
live and to work, and to toil all their lives for a
pittance that often does not enable them to escape
starvation and pauperism.
What your Holiness is actually, though of
course inadvertently, urging, is that earthly fathers
should assume the functions of the Heavenly
Father. It is not the business of one generation
to provide the succeeding generation “with all that
is needful to enable them honorably to keep themselves
from want and misery.” That is God’s
business. We no more create our children than we create
our fathers. It is God who is the Creator of each
succeeding generation as fully as of the one that
preceded it. And, to recall your own words (7),
“Nature [God], therefore, owes to man a storehouse
that shall never fail, the daily supply of his daily
wants. And this he finds only in the inexhaustible
fertility of the earth.” What you are now assuming
is, that it is the duty of men to provide for the wants
of their children by appropriating this storehouse and
depriving other men’s children of the unfailing
supply that God has provided for all.
The duty of the father to the child —
the duty possible to all fathers! Is it not so to conduct
himself, so to nurture and teach it, that it shall come
to manhood with a sound body, well-developed mind, habits
of virtue, piety and industry, and in a state of society
that shall give it and all others free access to the
bounty of God, the providence of the
All-Father?
In doing this the father would be doing more
to secure his children from want and misery than is
possible now to the richest of fathers — as much
more as the providence of God surpasses that of man. For
the justice of God laughs at the efforts of men to
circumvent it, and the subtle law that binds humanity
together poisons the rich in the sufferings of the
poor. Even the few who are able in the general
struggle to leave their children wealth that they fondly
think will keep them from want and misery in the
uncertainties of this mortal life — do they
succeed? Does experience show that it is a benefit to a
child to place him above his fellows and enable him to
think God’s law of labor is not for him? Is not
such wealth oftener a curse than a blessing, and does not
its expectation often destroy filial love and bring
dissensions and heartburnings into families? And how far
and how long are even the richest and strongest able to
exempt their children from the common lot? Nothing is
more certain than that the blood of the masters of the
world flows today in lazzaroni and that the descendants
of kings and princes tenant slums and workhouses.
But in the state of society we strive for, where the
monopoly and waste of God’s bounty would be done
away with and the fruits of labor would go to the
laborer, it would be within the ability of all to make
more than a comfortable living with reasonable labor. And
for those who might be crippled or incapacitated, or
deprived of their natural protectors and breadwinners,
the most ample provision could be made out of that great
and increasing fund with which God in his law of rent has
provided society — not as a matter of niggardly and
degrading alms, but as a matter of right, as the
assurance which in a Christian state society owes to all
its members.
Thus it is that the duty of the father, the obligation
to the child, instead of giving any support to private
property in land, utterly condemns it, urging us by the
most powerful considerations to abolish it in the simple
and efficacious way of the single tax.
This duty of the father, this obligation to children,
is not confined to those who have actually children of
their own, but rests on all of us who have come to the
powers and responsibilities of manhood.
For did not Christ set a little child in the midst of
the disciples, saying to them that the angels of such
little ones always behold the face of his Father; saying
to them that it were better for a man to hang a millstone
about his neck and plunge into the uttermost depths of
the sea than to injure such a little one?
And what today is the result of private property in
land in the richest of so-called Christian countries? Is
it not that young people fear to marry; that married
people fear to have children; that children are driven
out of life from sheer want of proper nourishment and
care, or compelled to toil when they ought to be at
school or at play; that great numbers of those who attain
maturity enter it with under-nourished bodies,
overstrained nerves, undeveloped minds — under
conditions that foredoom them, not merely to suffering,
but to crime; that fit them in advance for the prison and
the brothel?
If your Holiness will consider these things we are
confident that instead of defending private property in
land you will condemn it with anathema!
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the whole letter