I have said enough to show your Holiness the injustice into which you fall
in classing us, who in seeking virtually to abolish private property in land
seek more fully to secure the true rights of property, with those whom you
speak of as socialists, who wish to make all property common. But you also
do injustice to the socialists.
There are many, it is true, who feeling bitterly the monstrous wrongs of
the present distribution of wealth are animated only by a blind hatred of
the rich and a fierce desire to destroy existing social adjustments. This
class is indeed only less dangerous than those who proclaim that no social
improvement is needed or is possible. But it is not fair to confound with
them those who, however mistakenly, propose definite schemes of remedy.
The socialists, as I understand them, and as the term has come to apply
to anything like a definite theory and not to be vaguely and improperly used
to include all who desire social improvement, do not, as you imply, seek
the abolition of all private property. Those who do this are properly called
communists. What the socialists seek is the state assumption of capital (in
which they vaguely and erroneously include land), or more properly speaking,
of large capitals, and state management and direction of at least the larger
operations of industry. In this way they hope to abolish interest, which
they regard as a wrong and an evil; to do away with the gains of exchangers,
speculators, contractors and middlemen, which they regard as waste; to do
away with the wage system and secure general cooperation; and to prevent
competition, which they deem the fundamental cause of the impoverishment
of labor. The more moderate of them, without going so far, go in the same
direction, and seek some remedy or palliation of the worst forms of poverty
by government regulation. The essential character of socialism is that it
looks to the extension of the functions of the state for the remedy of social
evils; that it would substitute regulation and direction for competition;
and intelligent control by organized society for the free play of individual
desire and effort.
Though not usually classed as socialists, both the trades-unionists and
the protectionists have the same essential character. The trades-unionists
seek the increase of wages, the reduction of working-hours and the general
improvement in the condition of wage-workers, by organizing them into guilds
or associations which shall fix the rates at which they will sell their labor;
shall deal as one body with employers in case of dispute; shall use on occasion
their necessary weapon, the strike; and shall accumulate funds for such purposes
and for the purpose of assisting members when on a strike, or (sometimes)
when out of employment. The protectionists seek by governmental prohibitions
or taxes on imports to regulate the industry and control the exchanges of
each country, so as, they imagine, to diversify home industries and prevent
the competition of people of other countries.
At the opposite extreme are the anarchists, a term which, though frequently
applied to mere violent destructionists, refers also to those who, seeing
the many evils of too much government, regard government in itself as evil,
and believe that in the absence of coercive power the mutual interests of
men would secure voluntarily what cooperation is needed.
Differing from all these are those for whom I would speak. Believing that
the rights of true property are sacred, we would regard forcible communism
as robbery that would bring destruction. But we would not be disposed to
deny that voluntary communism might be the highest possible state of which
men can conceive. Nor do we say that it cannot be possible for mankind to
attain it, since among the early Christians and among the religious orders
of the Catholic Church we have examples of communistic societies on a small
scale. St. Peter and St. Paul, St. Thomas of Aquin and Fra Angelico, the
illustrious orders of the Carmelites and Franciscans, the Jesuits, whose
heroism carried the cross among the most savage tribes of American forests,
the societies that wherever your communion is known have deemed no work of
mercy too dangerous or too repellent — were or are communists. Knowing
these things we cannot take it on ourselves to say that a social condition
may not be possible in which an all-embracing love shall have taken the place
of all other motives. But we see that communism is only possible where there
exists a general and intense religious faith, and we see that such a state
can be reached only through a state of justice. For before a man can be a
saint he must first be an honest man.
With both anarchists and socialists, we, who for want of a better
term have come to call ourselves single-tax men, fundamentally differ.
We regard them
as erring in opposite directions — the one in ignoring the social nature
of man, the other in ignoring his individual nature. While we see that man
is primarily an individual, and that nothing but evil has come or can come
from the interference by the state with things that belong to individual
action, we also see that he is a social being, or, as Aristotle called him,
a political animal, and that the state is requisite to social advance, having
an indispensable place in the natural order. Looking on the bodily organism
as the analogue of the social organism, and on the proper functions of the
state as akin to those that in the human organism are discharged by the conscious
intelligence, while the play of individual impulse and interest performs
functions akin to those discharged in the bodily organism by the unconscious
instincts and involuntary motions, the anarchists seem to us like men who
would try to get along without heads and the socialists like men who would
try to rule the wonderfully complex and delicate internal relations of their
frames by conscious will.
The philosophical anarchists of whom I speak are few in number, and of little
practical importance. It is with socialism in its various phases that we
have to do battle.... read the whole letter