Believing that the social question is at bottom a
religious question, we deem it of happy augury to the
world that in your Encyclical the most influential of all
religious teachers has directed attention to the
condition of labor.
But while we appreciate the many wholesome truths you
utter, while we feel, as all must feel, that you are
animated by a desire to help the suffering and oppressed,
and to put an end to any idea that the church is divorced
from the aspiration for liberty and progress, yet it is
painfully obvious to us that one fatal assumption
hides from you the cause of the evils you see, and makes
it impossible for you to propose any adequate remedy.
This assumption is, that private property in land is of
the same nature and has the same sanctions as private
property in things produced by labor. In spite
of its undeniable truths and its benevolent spirit, your
Encyclical shows you to be involved in such difficulties
as a physician called to examine one suffering from
disease of the stomach would meet should he begin with a
refusal to consider the stomach.
Prevented by this assumption from seeing the true
cause, the only causes you find it possible to assign for
the growth of misery and wretchedness are the destruction
of working-men’s guilds in the last century, the
repudiation in public institutions and laws of the
ancient religion, rapacious usury, the custom of working
by contract, and the concentration of trade.
Such diagnosis is manifestly inadequate to account for
evils that are alike felt in Catholic countries, in
Protestant countries, in countries that adhere to the
Greek communion and in countries where no religion is
professed by the state; that are alike felt in old
countries and in new countries; where industry is simple
and where it is most elaborate; and amid all varieties of
industrial customs and relations.
But the real cause will be clear if you will consider
that since labor must find its workshop and reservoir in
land, the labor question is but another name for the land
question, and will reexamine your assumption that private
property in land is necessary and right.
See how fully adequate is the cause I have pointed
out. The most important of all the material relations of
man is his relation to the planet he inhabits, and hence,
the “impious resistance to the benevolent
intentions of his Creator,” which, as Bishop Nulty
says, is involved in private property in land, must
produce evils wherever it exists. But by virtue of the
law, “unto whom much is given, from him much is
required,” the very progress of civilization makes
the evils produced by private property in land more
wide-spread and intense.
What is producing throughout the civilized world that
condition of things you rightly describe as intolerable
is not this and that local error or minor mistake. It is
nothing less than the progress of civilization itself;
nothing less than the intellectual advance and the
material growth in which our century has been so
preeminent, acting in a state of society based on private
property in land; nothing less than the new gifts that in
our time God has been showering on man, but which are
being turned into scourges by man’s “impious
resistance to the benevolent intentions of his
Creator.” ....
Your Holiness will remember the great London dock
strike of two years ago, which, with that of other
influential men, received the moral support of that
Prince of the Church whom we of the English speech hold
higher and dearer than any prelate has been held by us
since the blood of Thomas à Becket stained the
Canterbury altar.
In a volume called “The Story of the
Dockers’ Strike,” written by Messrs. H.
Llewellyn Smith and Vaughan Nash, with an introduction by
Sydney Buxton, M.P., which advocates trades-unionism as
the solution of the labor question, and of which a large
number were sent to Australia as a sort of official
recognition of the generous aid received from there by
the strikers, I find in the summing up, on pages 164-165,
the following:
If the settlement lasts, work at the docks will be
more regular, better paid, and carried on under better
conditions than ever before. All this will be an
unqualified gain to those who get the benefit from it.
But another result will undoubtedly be to contract the
field of employment and lessen the number of those for
whom work can be found. The lower-class casual will, in
the end, find his position more precarious than ever
before, in proportion to the increased regularity of
work which the “fitter” of the laborers
will secure. The effect of the organization of dock
labor, as of all classes of labor, will be to squeeze
out the residuum. The loafer, the cadger, the failure
in the industrial race — the members of
“Class B” of Mr. Charles Booth’s
hierarchy of social classes — will be no gainers
by the change, but will rather find another door closed
against them, and this in many cases the last door to
employment.
I am far from wishing that your Holiness should join
in that pharisaical denunciation of trades-unions common
among those who, while quick to point out the injustice
of trades-unions in denying to others the equal right to
work, are themselves supporters of that more primary
injustice that denies the equal right to the
standing-place and natural material necessary to work.
What I wish to point out is that trades-unionism,
while it may be a partial palliative, is not a remedy;
that it has not that moral character which could alone
justify one in the position of your Holiness in urging it
as good in itself. Yet, so long as you insist on
private property in land what better can you
do?
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