You assume that the labor question is a question between wage-workers and
their employers. But working for wages is not the primary or exclusive
occupation of labor. Primarily men work for themselves without the intervention
of an employer. And the primary source of wages is in the earnings of labor,
the man who works for himself and consumes his own products receiving his
wages in the fruits of his labor. Are not fishermen, boatmen, cab-drivers,
peddlers, working farmers — all, in short, of the many workers who
get their wages directly by the sale of their services or products without
the medium of an employer, as much laborers as those who work for the specific
wages of an employer? In your consideration of remedies you do not seem
even to have thought of them. Yet in reality the laborers who work for
themselves are the first to be considered, since what men will be willing
to accept from employers depends manifestly on what they can get by working
for themselves.
You assume that all employers are rich men, who might raise wages much higher
were they not so grasping. But is it not the fact that the great majority
of employers are in reality as much pressed by competition as their workmen,
many of them constantly on the verge of failure? Such employers could not
possibly raise the wages they pay, however they might wish to, unless all
others were compelled to do so.
You assume that there are in the natural order two classes, the rich and
the poor, and that laborers naturally belong to the poor.
It is true as you say that there are differences in capacity, in diligence,
in health and in strength, that may produce differences in fortune. These,
however, are not the differences that divide men into rich and poor. The
natural differences in powers and aptitudes are certainly not greater than
are natural differences in stature. But while it is only by selecting giants
and dwarfs that we can find men twice as tall as others, yet in the difference
between rich and poor that exists today we find some men richer than other
men by the thousandfold and the millionfold.
Nowhere do these differences between wealth and poverty coincide with differences
in individual powers and aptitudes. The real difference between rich and
poor is the difference between those who hold the tollgates and those who
pay toll; between tribute-receivers and tribute-yielders. ...
It seems to us that your Holiness misses its real significance in intimating
that Christ, in becoming the son of a carpenter and himself working as a
carpenter, showed merely that “there is nothing to be ashamed of in
seeking one’s bread by labor.” To say that is almost like saying
that by not robbing people he showed that there is nothing to be ashamed
of in honesty. If you will consider how true in any large view is the classification
of all men into working-men, beggar-men and thieves, you will see that it
was morally impossible that Christ during his stay on earth should have been
anything else than a working-man, since he who came to fulfil the law must
by deed as well as word obey God’s law of labor.
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