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! ...
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. ...
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