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.
... read
the whole letter