INNOCENT purchasers of what involves wrong to others!
Is not the phrase absurd? If, in our legal tribunals,
"ignorance of the law excuseth no man," how much less can
it do so in the tribunal of morals — and it is this
to which compensationists appeal.
And innocence can only shield from the punishment due to
conscious wrong; it cannot give right. If you innocently
stand on my toes, you may fairly ask me not to be angry;
but you gain no right to continue to stand on them.
— A Perplexed
Philosopher
(Compensation)
WHEN a man exchanges property of one kind for property of
another kind he gives up the one with all its incidents
and takes in its stead the other with its incidents. He
cannot sell bricks and buy hay, and then complain because
the hay burned when the bricks would not. The greater
liability of the hay to burn is one of the incidents he
accepted in buying it. Nor can he exchange property
having moral sanction for property having only legal
sanction, and claim that the moral sanction of the thing
he sold attaches now to the thing he bought. That has
gone with the thing to the other party in the exchange.
Exchange transfers, it cannot create. Each party
gives up what right he had and takes what right the
other party had. The last holder obtains no moral right
that the first holder did not have. — A Perplexed
Philosopher
(Compensation) ... go to "Gems from
George"
We hold: That—
This world is the creation of God.
The men brought into it for the brief period of their
earthly lives are the equal creatures of his bounty, the
equal subjects of his provident care.
By his constitution man is beset by physical wants, on
the satisfaction of which depend not only the maintenance
of his physical life but also the development of his
intellectual and spiritual life.
God has made the satisfaction of these wants dependent
on man’s own exertions, giving him the power and
laying on him the injunction to labor — a power
that of itself raises him far above the brute, since we
may reverently say that it enables him to become as it
were a helper in the creative work.
God has not put on man the task of making bricks
without straw. With the need for labor and the power to
labor he has also given to man the material for labor.
This material is land — man physically being a land
animal, who can live only on and from land, and can use
other elements, such as air, sunshine and water, only by
the use of land.
Being the equal creatures of the Creator, equally
entitled under his providence to live their lives and
satisfy their needs, men are equally entitled to the use
of land, and any adjustment that denies this equal use of
land is morally wrong. ... read the whole
letter