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.) ...
3. That private property in land deprives no one of the use of land. (8.)
Your own statement that land is the inexhaustible storehouse that God owes
to man must have aroused in your Holiness’s mind an uneasy questioning
of its appropriation as private property, for, as though to reassure yourself,
you proceed to argue that its ownership by some will not injure others. You
say in substance, that even though divided among private owners the earth
does not cease to minister to the needs of all, since those who do not possess
the soil can by selling their labor obtain in payment the produce of the
land.
Suppose that to your Holiness as a judge of morals one should put this case
of conscience:
I am one of several children to whom our father left a field abundant for
our support. As he assigned no part of it to any one of us in particular,
leaving the limits of our separate possession to be fixed by ourselves, I
being the eldest took the whole field in exclusive ownership. But in doing
so I have not deprived my brothers of their support from it, for I have let
them work for me on it, paying them from the produce as much wages as I would
have had to pay strangers. Is there any reason why my conscience should not
be clear?
What would be your answer? Would you not tell him that he was in mortal
sin, and that his excuse added to his guilt? Would you not call on him to
make restitution and to do penance?
Or, suppose that as a temporal prince your Holiness were ruler of a rainless
land, such as Egypt, where there were no springs or brooks, their want being
supplied by a bountiful river like the Nile. Supposing that having sent a
number of your subjects to make fruitful this land, bidding them do justly
and prosper, you were told that some of them had set up a claim of ownership
in the river, refusing the others a drop of water, except as they bought
it of them; and that thus they had become rich without work, while the others,
though working hard, were so impoverished by paying for water as to be hardly
able to exist?
Would not your indignation wax hot when this was told?
Suppose that then the river-owners should send to you and thus excuse their
action:
The river, though divided among private owners, ceases not thereby
to minister to the needs of all, for there is no one who drinks who does
not
drink of
the water of the river. Those who do not possess the water of the river
contribute their labor to get it; so that it may be truly said that all
water is supplied
either from one’s own river, or from some laborious industry which
is paid for either in the water, or in that which is exchanged for the
water.
Would the indignation of your Holiness be abated? Would it not wax fiercer
yet for the insult to your intelligence of this excuse?
I do not need more formally to show your Holiness that between utterly depriving
a man of God’s gifts and depriving him of God’s gifts unless
he will buy them, is merely the difference between the robber who leaves
his victim to die and the robber who puts him to ransom. But I would like
to point out how your statement that “the earth, though divided among
private owners, ceases not thereby to minister to the needs of all” overlooks
the largest facts.
From your palace of the Vatican the eye may rest on the expanse of the Campagna,
where the pious toil of religious congregations and the efforts of the state
are only now beginning to make it possible for men to live. Once that expanse
was tilled by thriving husbandmen and dotted with smiling hamlets. What for
centuries has condemned it to desertion? History tells us. It was private
property in land; the growth of the great estates of which Pliny saw
that ancient Italy was perishing; the cause that, by bringing failure to the crop
of men, let in the Goths and Vandals, gave Roman Britain to the worship of
Odin and Thor, and in what were once the rich and populous provinces of the
East shivered the thinned ranks and palsied arms of the legions on the simitars
of Mohammedan hordes, and in the sepulcher of our Lord and in the Church
of St. Sophia trampled the cross to rear the crescent!
If you will go to Scotland, you may see great tracts that under the Gaelic
tenure, which recognized the right of each to a foothold in the soil, bred
sturdy men, but that now, under the recognition of private property in land,
are given up to wild animals. If you go to Ireland, your Bishops will show
you, on lands where now only beasts graze, the traces of hamlets that, when
they were young priests, were filled with honest, kindly, religious people.*
* Let any one who wishes visit this diocese and see with his own eyes
the vast and boundless extent of the fairest land in Europe that has been
ruthlessly
depopulated since the commencement of the present century, and which
is now abandoned to a loneliness and solitude more depressing than that
of the prairie
or the wilderness. Thus has this land system actually exercised the power
of life and death on a vast scale, for which there is no parallel even
in the dark records of slavery. — Bishop Nulty’s Letter to
the Clergy and Laity of the Diocese of Meath.
If you will come to the United States, you will find in a land wide enough
and rich enough to support in comfort the whole population of Europe, the
growth of a sentiment that looks with evil eye on immigration, because the
artificial scarcity that results from private property in land makes it seem
as if there is not room enough and work enough for those already here.
Or go to the Antipodes, and in Australia, as in England, you may see that
private property in land is operating to leave the land barren and to crowd
the bulk of the population into great cities. Go wherever you please where
the forces loosed by modern invention are beginning to be felt and you may
see that private property in land is the curse, denounced by the prophet,
that prompts men to lay field to field till they “alone dwell in the
midst of the earth.
To the mere materialist this is sin and shame. Shall we to whom this world
is God’s world — we who hold that man is called to this life
only as a prelude to a higher life — shall we defend it? ...
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. (11.)
Even were it true that the common opinion of mankind has sanctioned private
property in land, this would no more prove its justice than the once universal
practice of the known world would have proved the justice of slavery.
But it is not true. Examination will show that wherever we can trace them
the first perceptions of mankind have always recognized the equality of right
to land, and that when individual possession became necessary to secure the
right of ownership in things produced by labor some method of securing equality,
sufficient in the existing state of social development, was adopted. Thus,
among some peoples, land used for cultivation was periodically divided, land
used for pasturage and wood being held in common. Among others, every family
was permitted to hold what land it needed for a dwelling and for cultivation,
but the moment that such use and cultivation stopped any one else could step
in and take it on like tenure. Of the same nature were the land laws of the
Mosaic code. The land, first fairly divided among the people, was made inalienable
by the provision of the jubilee, under which, if sold, it reverted every
fiftieth year to the children of its original possessors.
Private property in land as we know it, the attaching to land of the same
right of ownership that justly attaches to the products of labor, has never
grown up anywhere save by usurpation or force. Like slavery, it is the result
of war. It comes to us of the modern world from your ancestors, the Romans,
whose civilization it corrupted and whose empire it destroyed.
It made with the freer spirit of the northern peoples the combination of
the feudal system, in which, though subordination was substituted for equality,
there was still a rough recognition of the principle of common rights in
land. A fief was a trust, and to enjoyment was annexed some obligation. The
sovereign, the representative of the whole people, was the only owner of
land. Of him, immediately or mediately, held tenants, whose possession involved
duties or payments, which, though rudely and imperfectly, embodied the idea
that we would carry out in the single tax, of taking land values for public
uses. The crown lands maintained the sovereign and the civil list; the church
lands defrayed the cost of public worship and instruction, of the relief
of the sick, the destitute and the wayworn; while the military tenures provided
for public defense and bore the costs of war. A fourth and very large portion
of the land remained in common, the people of the neighborhood being free
to pasture it, cut wood on it, or put it to other common uses.
In this partial yet substantial recognition of common rights to land is
to be found the reason why, in a time when the industrial arts were rude,
wars frequent, and the great discoveries and inventions of our time unthought
of, the condition of the laborer was devoid of that grinding poverty which
despite our marvelous advances now exists. Speaking of England, the highest
authority on such subjects, the late Professor Therold Rogers, declares that
in the thirteenth century there was no class so poor, so helpless, so pressed
and degraded as are millions of Englishmen in our boasted nineteenth century;
and that, save in times of actual famine, there was no laborer so poor as
to fear that his wife and children might come to want even were he taken
from them. Dark and rude in many respects as they were, these were the times
when the cathedrals and churches and religious houses whose ruins yet excite
our admiration were built; the times when England had no national debt, no
poor law, no standing army, no hereditary paupers, no thousands and thousands
of human beings rising in the morning without knowing where they might lay
their heads at night.
With the decay of the feudal system, the system of private property in land
that had destroyed Rome was extended. As to England, it may briefly be said
that the crown lands were for the most part given away to favorites; that
the church lands were parceled among his courtiers by Henry VIII., and in
Scotland grasped by the nobles; that the military dues were finally remitted
in the seventeenth century, and taxation on consumption substituted; and
that by a process beginning with the Tudors and extending to our own time
all but a mere fraction of the commons were inclosed by the greater landowners;
while the same private ownership of land was extended over Ireland and the
Scottish Highlands, partly by the sword and partly by bribery of the chiefs.
Even the military dues, had they been commuted, not remitted, would today
have more than sufficed to pay all public expenses without one penny of other
taxation.
Of the New World, whose institutions but continue those of Europe, it is
only necessary to say that to the parceling out of land in great tracts is
due the backwardness and turbulence of Spanish America; that to the large
plantations of the Southern States of the Union was due the persistence of
slavery there, and that the more northern settlements showed the earlier
English feeling, land being fairly well divided and the attempts to establish
manorial estates coming to little or nothing. In this lies the secret of
the more vigorous growth of the Northern States. But the idea that land was
to be treated as private property had been thoroughly established in English
thought before the colonial period ended, and it has been so treated by the
United States and by the several States. And though land was at first sold
cheaply, and then given to actual settlers, it was also sold in large quantities
to speculators, given away in great tracts for railroads and other purposes,
until now the public domain of the United States, which a generation ago
seemed illimitable, has practically gone. And this, as the experience of
other countries shows, is the natural result in a growing community of making
land private property. When the possession of land means the gain of unearned
wealth, the strong and unscrupulous will secure it. But when, as we propose,
economic rent, the “unearned increment of wealth,” is taken by
the state for the use of the community, then land will pass into the hands
of users and remain there, since no matter how great its value, its possession
will be profitable only to users.
As to private property in land having conduced to the peace and tranquillity
of human life, it is not necessary more than to allude to the notorious fact
that the struggle for land has been the prolific source of wars and of lawsuits,
while it is the poverty engendered by private property in land that makes
the prison and the workhouse the unfailing attributes of what we call Christian
civilization.
Your Holiness intimates that the Divine Law gives its sanction to the private
ownership of land, quoting from Deuteronomy, “Thou shalt not covet
thy neighbor’s wife, nor his house, nor his field, nor his man-servant,
nor his maid-servant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything which is his.”
If, as your Holiness conveys, this inclusion of the words, “nor his
field,” is to be taken as sanctioning private property in land as it
exists today, then, but with far greater force, must the words, “his
man-servant, nor his maid-servant,” be taken to sanction chattel slavery;
for it is evident from other provisions of the same code that these terms
referred both to bondsmen for a term of years and to perpetual slaves. But
the word “field” involves the idea of use and improvement, to
which the right of possession and ownership does attach without recognition
of property in the land itself. And that this reference to the “field” is
not a sanction of private property in land as it exists today is proved by
the fact that the Mosaic code expressly denied such unqualified ownership
in land, and with the declaration, “the land also shall not be sold
forever, because it is mine, and you are strangers and sojourners with me,” provided
for its reversion every fiftieth year; thus, in a way adapted to the primitive
industrial conditions of the time, securing to all of the chosen people a
foothold in the soil.
Nowhere in fact throughout the Scriptures can the slightest justification
be found for the attaching to land of the same right of property that justly
attaches to the things produced by labor. Everywhere is it treated as the
free bounty of God, “the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.” ...
7. That the private ownership of land stimulates industry, increases
wealth, and attaches men to the soil and to their country. (51.)
The idea, as expressed by Arthur Young, that “the magic of property
turns barren sands to gold” springs from the confusion of ownership
with possession, of which I have before spoken, that attributes to private
property in land what is due to security of the products of labor. It is
needless for me again to point out that the change we propose, the taxation
for public uses of land values, or economic rent, and the abolition of other
taxes, would give to the user of land far greater security for the fruits
of his labor than the present system and far greater permanence of possession.
Nor is it necessary further to show how it would give homes to those who
are now homeless and bind men to their country. For under it every one who
wanted a piece of land for a home or for productive use could get it without
purchase price and hold it even without tax, since the tax we propose would
not fall on all land, nor even on all land in use, but only on land better
than the poorest land in use, and is in reality not a tax at all, but merely
a return to the state for the use of a valuable privilege. And even those
who from circumstances or occupation did not wish to make permanent use of
land would still have an equal interest with all others in the land of their
country and in the general prosperity.
But I should like your Holiness to consider how utterly unnatural is the
condition of the masses in the richest and most progressive of Christian
countries; how large bodies of them live in habitations in which a rich man
would not ask his dog to dwell; how the great majority have no homes from
which they are not liable on the slightest misfortune to be evicted; how
numbers have no homes at all, but must seek what shelter chance or charity
offers. I should like to ask your Holiness to consider how the great majority
of men in such countries have no interest whatever in what they are taught
to call their native land, for which they are told that on occasions it is
their duty to fight or to die. What right, for instance, have the majority
of your countrymen in the land of their birth? Can they live in Italy outside
of a prison or a poorhouse except as they buy the privilege from some of
the exclusive owners of Italy? Cannot an Englishman, an American, an Arab
or a Japanese do as much? May not what was said centuries ago by Tiberius
Gracchus be said today: “Men of Rome! you are called the lords of the
world, yet have no right to a square foot of its soil! The wild beasts have
their dens, but the soldiers of Italy have only water and air!”
What is true of Italy is true of the civilized world — is becoming
increasingly true. It is the inevitable effect as civilization progresses
of private property in land.
... read the whole letter