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.) ...
6. That fathers should provide for their children and that private
property in land is necessary to enable them to do so. (14-17.)
With all that your Holiness has to say of the sacredness of the family
relation we are in full accord. But how the obligation of the father
to the child can justify private property in land we cannot see. You
reason that private property in land is necessary to the discharge of
the duty of the father, and is therefore requisite and just, because —
It is a most sacred law of nature that a father must provide food
and all necessaries for those whom he has begotten; and, similarly,
nature
dictates that a man’s children, who carry on, as it were, and
continue his own personality, should be provided by him with all
that is needful
to enable them honorably to keep themselves from want and misery
in the uncertainties of this mortal life. Now, in no other way can
a father
effect this except by the ownership of profitable property, which
he can transmit to his children by inheritance. (14.)
Thanks to Him who has bound the generations of men together by a provision
that brings the tenderest love to greet our entrance into the world and
soothes our exit with filial piety, it is both the duty and the joy of
the father to care for the child till its powers mature, and afterwards
in the natural order it becomes the duty and privilege of the child to
be the stay of the parent. This is the natural reason for that relation
of marriage, the groundwork of the sweetest, tenderest and purest of
human joys, which the Catholic Church has guarded with such unremitting
vigilance.
We do, for a few years, need the providence of our fathers after
the flesh. But how small, how transient, how narrow is this need, as
compared
with our constant need for the providence of Him in whom we live, move
and have our being — Our Father who art in Heaven! It is to him, “the
giver of every good and perfect gift,” and not to our fathers after
the flesh, that Christ taught us to pray, “Give us this day our
daily bread.” And how true it is that it is through him that the
generations of men exist! Let the mean temperature of the earth rise
or fall a few degrees, an amount as nothing compared with differences
produced in our laboratories, and mankind would disappear as ice disappears
under a tropical sun, would fall as the leaves fall at the touch of frost.
Or, let for two or three seasons the earth refuse her increase, and how
many of our millions would remain alive?
The duty of fathers to transmit to their children profitable
property that will enable them to keep themselves from want and misery
in the
uncertainties of this mortal life! What is not possible cannot be a duty.
And how is it possible for fathers to do that? Your Holiness has not
considered how mankind really lives from hand to mouth, getting each
day its daily bread; how little one generation does or can leave another.
It is doubtful if the wealth of the civilized world all told amounts
to anything like as much as one year’s labor, while it is certain
that if labor were to stop and men had to rely on existing accumulation,
it would be only a few days ere in the richest countries pestilence and
famine would stalk.
The profitable property your Holiness refers to, is private property
in land. Now profitable land, as all economists will agree, is land
superior to the land that the ordinary man can get. It is land that
will yield
an income to the owner as owner, and therefore that will permit the
owner to appropriate the products of labor without doing labor, its
profitableness
to the individual involving the robbery of other individuals. It is
therefore possible only for some fathers to leave their children
profitable land.
What therefore your Holiness practically declares is, that
it is the duty of all fathers to struggle to leave their children what
only the
few peculiarly strong, lucky or unscrupulous can leave; and that, a
something that involves the robbery of others — their deprivation
of the material gifts of God.
This anti-Christian doctrine has been long in practice throughout the
Christian world. What are its results?
Are they not the very evils set forth in your Encyclical? Are they not,
so far from enabling men to keep themselves from want and misery in the
uncertainties of this mortal life, to condemn the great masses of men
to want and misery that the natural conditions of our mortal life do
not entail; to want and misery deeper and more wide-spread than exist
among heathen savages? Under the régime of private property
in land and in the richest countries not five per cent of fathers are
able
at their death to leave anything substantial to their children, and probably
a large majority do not leave enough to bury them! Some few children
are left by their fathers richer than it is good for them to be, but
the vast majority not only are left nothing by their fathers, but by
the system that makes land private property are deprived of the bounty
of their Heavenly Father; are compelled to sue others for permission
to live and to work, and to toil all their lives for a pittance that
often does not enable them to escape starvation and pauperism.
What your Holiness is actually, though of course inadvertently,
urging, is that earthly fathers should assume the functions of the
Heavenly Father. It is not the business of one generation to provide the succeeding generation “with
all that is needful to enable them honorably to keep themselves from
want and misery.” That is God’s business. We no more create
our children than we create our fathers. It is God who is the Creator
of each succeeding generation as fully as of the one that preceded it.
And, to recall your own words (7), “Nature [God], therefore, owes
to man a storehouse that shall never fail, the daily supply of his daily
wants. And this he finds only in the inexhaustible fertility of the earth.” What
you are now assuming is, that it is the duty of men to provide for the
wants of their children by appropriating this storehouse and depriving
other men’s children of the unfailing supply that God has provided
for all.
The duty of the father to the child — the duty possible
to all fathers! Is it not so to conduct himself, so to nurture and
teach it,
that it shall come to manhood with a sound body, well-developed mind,
habits of virtue, piety and industry, and in a state of society that
shall give it and all others free access to the bounty of God, the providence
of the All-Father?
In doing this the father would be doing more to secure his children
from want and misery than is possible now to the richest of fathers — as
much more as the providence of God surpasses that of man. For the justice
of God laughs at the efforts of men to circumvent it, and the subtle
law that binds humanity together poisons the rich in the sufferings of
the poor. Even the few who are able in the general struggle to leave
their children wealth that they fondly think will keep them from want
and misery in the uncertainties of this mortal life — do they succeed?
Does experience show that it is a benefit to a child to place him above
his fellows and enable him to think God’s law of labor is not for
him? Is not such wealth oftener a curse than a blessing, and does not
its expectation often destroy filial love and bring dissensions and heartburnings
into families? And how far and how long are even the richest and strongest
able to exempt their children from the common lot? Nothing is more certain
than that the blood of the masters of the world flows today in lazzaroni
and that the descendants of kings and princes tenant slums and workhouses.
But in the state of society we strive for, where the monopoly and waste
of God’s bounty would be done away with and the fruits of labor
would go to the laborer, it would be within the ability of all to make
more than a comfortable living with reasonable labor. And for those who
might be crippled or incapacitated, or deprived of their natural protectors
and breadwinners, the most ample provision could be made out of that
great and increasing fund with which God in his law of rent has provided
society — not as a matter of niggardly and degrading alms, but
as a matter of right, as the assurance which in a Christian state society
owes to all its members.
Thus it is that the duty of the father, the obligation to the child,
instead of giving any support to private property in land, utterly condemns
it, urging us by the most powerful considerations to abolish it in the
simple and efficacious way of the single tax.
This duty of the father, this obligation to children, is not confined
to those who have actually children of their own, but rests on all of
us who have come to the powers and responsibilities of manhood.
For did not Christ set a little child in the midst of the disciples,
saying to them that the angels of such little ones always behold the
face of his Father; saying to them that it were better for a man to hang
a millstone about his neck and plunge into the uttermost depths of the
sea than to injure such a little one?
And what today is the result of private property in land in the richest
of so-called Christian countries? Is it not that young people fear to
marry; that married people fear to have children; that children are driven
out of life from sheer want of proper nourishment and care, or compelled
to toil when they ought to be at school or at play; that great numbers
of those who attain maturity enter it with under-nourished bodies, overstrained
nerves, undeveloped minds — under conditions that foredoom them,
not merely to suffering, but to crime; that fit them in advance for the
prison and the brothel?
If your Holiness will consider these things we are confident that instead
of defending private property in land you will condemn it with anathema!
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