This is not a matter of charity. Rather, it is a
matter of justice. Our current system gives a lot to the
owners of choice land and the owners of scarce or needed
natural resources. I'm not arguing that they've violated
any laws; they are playing by the rules! But our rules
are just plain wrong! We need to correct them, so that we
collect from those who currently are permitted to
privatize what are rightly our common resources, the
annual value of those resources.
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.” ...
The discoveries of science, the gains of invention,
have given to us in this wonderful century more than has
been given to men in any time before; and, in a degree so
rapidly accelerating as to suggest geometrical
progression, are placing in our hands new material
powers. But with the benefit comes the obligation. In a
civilization beginning to pulse with steam and
electricity, where the sun paints pictures and the
phonograph stores speech, it will not do to be merely as
just as were our fathers. Intellectual advance
and material advance require corresponding moral
advance. Knowledge and power are neither good
nor evil. They are not ends but means — evolving
forces that if not controlled in orderly relations must
take disorderly and destructive forms. The deepening
pain, the increasing perplexity, the growing discontent
for which, as you truly say, some remedy must be found
and quickly found, mean nothing less than that forces of
destruction swifter and more terrible than those that
have shattered every preceding civilization are already
menacing ours — that if it does not quickly rise to
a higher moral level; if it does not become in deed as in
word a Christian civilization, on the wall of its
splendor must flame the doom of Babylon: “Thou art
weighed in the balance and found wanting!” ...
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whole letter