Or, to state the same thing in another way: Land being necessary to life
and labor, its owners will be able, in return for permission to use it, to
obtain from mere laborers all that labor can produce, save enough to enable
such of them to maintain life as are wanted by the landowners and their dependents.
Thus, where private property in land has divided society into a
landowning class and a landless class, there is no possible invention or
improvement,
whether it be industrial, social or moral, which, so long as it does not
affect the ownership of land, can prevent poverty or relieve the general
conditions of mere laborers. For whether the effect of any
invention or improvement be to increase what labor can produce or to decrease what is required to
support the laborer, it can, so soon as it becomes general, result only in
increasing the income of the owners of land, without at all benefiting the
mere laborers. In no event can those possessed of the mere ordinary power
to labor, a power utterly useless without the means necessary to labor, keep
more of their earnings than enough to enable them to live.
How true this is we may see in the facts of today. In our own time invention
and discovery have enormously increased the productive power of labor, and
at the same time greatly reduced the cost of many things necessary to the
support of the laborer. Have these improvements anywhere raised the earnings
of the mere laborer? Have not their benefits mainly gone to the owners of
land — enormously increased land values?
I say mainly, for some part of the benefit has gone to the cost of monstrous
standing armies and warlike preparations; to the payment of interest on great
public debts; and, largely disguised as interest on fictitious capital, to
the owners of monopolies other than that of land. But improvements that would
do away with these wastes would not benefit labor; they would simply increase
the profits of landowners. Were standing armies and all their incidents abolished,
were all monopolies other than that of land done away with, were governments
to become models of economy, were the profits of speculators, of middlemen,
of all sorts of exchangers saved, were every one to become so strictly honest
that no policemen, no courts, no prisons, no precautions against dishonesty
would be needed — the result would not differ from that which has followed
the increase of productive power.
Nay, would not these very blessings bring starvation to many of those who
now manage to live? Is it not true that if there were proposed today, what
all Christian men ought to pray for, the complete disbandment of all the
armies of Europe, the greatest fears would be aroused for the consequences
of throwing on the labor-market so many unemployed laborers?
The explanation of this and of similar paradoxes that in our time perplex
on every side may be easily seen. The effect of all inventions and
improvements that increase productive power, that save waste and economize
effort, is
to lessen the labor required for a given result, and thus to save labor,
so that we speak of them as labor-saving inventions or improvements. Now,
in a natural state of society where the rights of all to the use of the earth
are acknowledged, labor-saving improvements might go to the very utmost that
can be imagined without lessening the demand for men, since in such natural
conditions the demand for men lies in their own enjoyment of life and the
strong instincts that the Creator has implanted in the human breast. But
in that unnatural state of society where the masses of men are disinherited
of all but the power to labor when opportunity to labor is given them by
others, there the demand for them becomes simply the demand for their services
by those who hold this opportunity, and man himself becomes a commodity.
Hence, although the natural effect of labor-saving improvement is to increase
wages, yet in the unnatural condition which private ownership of the land
begets, the effect, even of such moral improvements as the disbandment of
armies and the saving of the labor that vice entails, is, by lessening the
commercial demand, to lower wages and reduce mere laborers to starvation
or pauperism. If labor-saving inventions and improvements could be carried
to the very abolition of the necessity for labor, what would be the result?
Would it not be that landowners could then get all the wealth that the land
was capable of producing, and would have no need at all for laborers, who
must then either starve or live as pensioners on the bounty of the landowners?
Thus, so long as private property in land continues — so long as some
men are treated as owners of the earth and other men can live on it only
by their sufferance — human wisdom can devise no means by which the
evils of our present condition may be avoided. ...
See how fully and how beautifully Christ’s life on earth illustrated
this law. Entering our earthly life in the weakness of infancy, as it is
appointed that all should enter it, he lovingly took what in the natural
order is lovingly rendered, the sustenance, secured by labor, that one generation
owes to its immediate successors. Arrived at maturity, he earned his own
subsistence by that common labor in which the majority of men must and do
earn it. Then passing to a higher — to the very highest — sphere
of labor, he earned his subsistence by the teaching of moral and spiritual
truths, receiving its material wages in the love-offerings of grateful hearers,
and not refusing the costly spikenard with which Mary anointed his feet.
So, when he chose his disciples, he did not go to landowners or other monopolists
who live on the labor of others, but to common laboring-men. And when he
called them to a higher sphere of labor and sent them out to teach moral
and spiritual truths, he told them to take, without condescension on the
one hand or sense of degradation on the other, the loving return for such
labor, saying to them that “the laborer is worthy of his hire,” thus
showing, what we hold, that all labor does not consist in what is called
manual labor, but that whoever helps to add to the material, intellectual,
moral or spiritual fullness of life is also a laborer.*
* Nor should it be forgotten that the investigator, the
philosopher, the teacher, the artist, the poet, the priest, though not
engaged in the
production of wealth, are not only engaged in the production of utilities
and satisfactions
to which the production of wealth is only a means, but by acquiring and
diffusing knowledge, stimulating mental powers and elevating the moral
sense, may greatly
increase the ability to produce wealth. For man does not live by bread
alone. . . . He who by any exertion of mind or body adds to the aggregate
of enjoyable
wealth, increases the sum of human knowledge, or gives to human life
higher elevation or greater fullness — he is, in the large meaning of the
words, a “producer,” a “working-man,” a “laborer,” and
is honestly earning honest wages. But he who without doing aught to make
mankind richer, wiser, better, happier, lives on the toil of others — he,
no matter by what name of honor he may be called, or how lustily the priests
of Mammon may swing their censers before him, is in the last analysis but
a beggar-man or a thief. — Protection or Free Trade, pp. 74-75.
In assuming that laborers, even ordinary manual laborers, are naturally
poor, you ignore the fact that labor is the producer of wealth, and attribute
to the natural law of the Creator an injustice that comes from man’s
impious violation of his benevolent intention. In the rudest stage
of the arts it is possible, where justice prevails, for all well men to earn
a living.
With the labor-saving appliances of our time, it should be possible for all
to earn much more. And so, in saying that poverty is no disgrace,
you convey an unreasonable implication. For poverty ought to be a disgrace,
since in
a condition of social justice, it would, where unsought from religious motives
or unimposed by unavoidable misfortune, imply recklessness or laziness. ... read the whole letter