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!
...
I have already referred generally to the defects that attach to all socialistic
remedies for the evil condition of labor, but respect for your Holiness
dictates that I should speak specifically, even though briefly, of the
remedies proposed or suggested by you.
Of these, the widest and strongest are that the state should restrict the
hours of labor, the employment of women and children, the unsanitary conditions
of workshops, etc. Yet how little may in this way be accomplished.
A strong, absolute ruler might hope by such regulations to alleviate the
conditions of chattel slaves. But the tendency of our times is toward democracy,
and democratic states are necessarily weaker in paternalism, while in the
industrial slavery, growing out of private ownership of land, that prevails
in Christendom today, it is not the master who forces the slave to labor,
but the slave who urges the master to let him labor. Thus the greatest difficulty
in enforcing such regulations comes from those whom they are intended to
benefit. It is not, for instance, the masters who make it difficult to enforce
restrictions on child labor in factories, but the mothers, who, prompted
by poverty, misrepresent the ages of their children even to the masters,
and teach the children to misrepresent.
But while in large factories and mines regulations as to hours, ages, etc.,
though subject to evasion and offering opportunities for extortion and corruption,
may be to some extent enforced, how can they have any effect in those far
wider branches of industry where the laborer works for himself or for small
employers?
All such remedies are of the nature of the remedy for overcrowding that
is generally prescribed with them — the restriction under penalty of
the number who may occupy a room and the demolition of unsanitary buildings.
Since these measures have no tendency to increase house accommodation or
to augment ability to pay for it, the overcrowding that is forced back in
some places goes on in other places and to a worse degree. All such remedies
begin at the wrong end. They are like putting on brake and bit to hold in
quietness horses that are being lashed into frenzy; they are like trying
to stop a locomotive by holding its wheels instead of shutting off steam;
like attempting to cure smallpox by driving back its pustules. Men do not
overwork themselves because they like it; it is not in the nature of the
mother’s heart to send children to work when they ought to be at play;
it is not of choice that laborers will work under dangerous and unsanitary
conditions. These things, like overcrowding, come from the sting of poverty.
And so long as the poverty of which they are the expression is left untouched,
restrictions such as you indorse can have only partial and evanescent results.
The cause remaining, repression in one place can only bring out its effects
in other places, and the task you assign to the state is as hopeless as to
ask it to lower the level of the ocean by bailing out the sea.
Nor can the state cure poverty by regulating wages. It is as much beyond
the power of the state to regulate wages as it is to regulate the rates of
interest. Usury laws have been tried again and again, but the only effect
they have ever had has been to increase what the poorer borrowers must pay,
and for the same reasons that all attempts to lower by regulation the price
of goods have always resulted merely in increasing them. The general rate
of wages is fixed by the ease or difficulty with which labor can obtain access
to land, ranging from the full earnings of labor, where land is free, to
the least on which laborers can live and reproduce, where land is fully monopolized.
Thus, where it has been comparatively easy for laborers to get land, as in
the United States and in Australasia, wages have been higher than in Europe
and it has been impossible to get European laborers to work there for wages
that they would gladly accept at home; while as monopolization goes on under
the influence of private property in land, wages tend to fall, and the social
conditions of Europe to appear. Thus, under the partial yet substantial recognition
of common rights to land, of which I have spoken, the many attempts of the
British Parliament to reduce wages by regulation failed utterly. And so,
when the institution of private property in land had done its work in England,
all attempts of Parliament to raise wages proved unavailing. In the beginning
of this century it was even attempted to increase the earnings of laborers
by grants in aid of wages. But the only result was to lower commensurately
what wages employers paid.
The state could maintain wages above the tendency of the market (for as
I have shown labor deprived of land becomes a commodity), only by offering
employment to all who wish it; or by lending its sanction to strikes and
supporting them with its funds. Thus it is, that the thoroughgoing socialists
who want the state to take all industry into its hands are much more logical
than those timid socialists who propose that the state should regulate private
industry — but only a little.
The same hopelessness attends your suggestion that working-people should
be encouraged by the state in obtaining a share of the land. It is evident
that by this you mean that, as is now being attempted in Ireland, the state
shall buy out large landowners in favor of small ones, establishing what
are known as peasant proprietors. Supposing that this can be done even to
a considerable extent, what will be accomplished save to substitute a larger
privileged class for a smaller privileged class? What will be done for the
still larger class that must remain, the laborers of the agricultural districts,
the workmen of the towns, the proletarians of the cities? Is it not true,
as Professor De Laveleye says, that in such countries as Belgium, where peasant
proprietary exists, the tenants, for there still exist tenants, are rack-rented
with a mercilessness unknown in Ireland? Is it not true that in such countries
as Belgium the condition of the mere laborer is even worse than it is in
Great Britain, where large ownerships obtain? And if the state attempts to
buy up land for peasant proprietors will not the effect be, what is seen
today in Ireland, to increase the market value of land and thus make it more
difficult for those not so favored, and for those who will come after, to
get land? How, moreover, on the principle which you declare (36), that “to
the state the interests of all are equal, whether high or low,” will
you justify state aid to one man to buy a bit of land without also insisting
on state aid to another man to buy a donkey, to another to buy a shop, to
another to buy the tools and materials of a trade — state aid in short
to everybody who may be able to make good use of it or thinks that he could?
And are you not thus landed in communism — not the communism of the
early Christians and of the religious orders, but communism that uses the
coercive power of the state to take rightful property by force from those
who have, to give to those who have not? For the state has no purse of Fortunatus;
the state cannot repeat the miracle of the loaves and fishes; all that the
state can give, it must get by some form or other of the taxing power. And
whether it gives or lends money, or gives or lends credit, it cannot give
to those who have not, without taking from those who have.
But aside from all this, any scheme of dividing up land while maintaining
private property in land is futile. Small holdings cannot coexist with the
treatment of land as private property where civilization is materially advancing
and wealth augments. We may see this in the economic tendencies that in ancient
times were the main cause that transformed world-conquering Italy from a
land of small farms to a land of great estates. We may see it in the fact
that while two centuries ago the majority of English farmers were owners
of the land they tilled, tenancy has been for a long time the all but universal
condition of the English farmer. And now the mighty forces of steam and electricity
have come to urge concentration. It is in the United States that we may see
on the largest scale how their power is operating to turn a nation of landowners
into a nation of tenants. The principle is clear and irresistible. Material
progress makes land more valuable, and when this increasing value is left
to private owners land must pass from the ownership of the poor into the
ownership of the rich, just as diamonds so pass when poor men find them.
What the British government is attempting in Ireland is to build snow-houses
in the Arabian desert! to plant bananas in Labrador!
There is one way, and only one way, in which working-people
in our civilization may be secured a share in the land of their country,
and that
is the way
that we propose — the taking of the profits of landownership for the
community. ... read the whole letter