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.
With the socialists we have some points of agreement, for we
recognize fully the social nature of man and believe that all monopolies should
be held and governed by the state. In these, and in directions where
the general health, knowledge, comfort and convenience might be improved,
we, too, would extend the functions of the state.
But it seems to us the vice of socialism in all its
degrees is its want of radicalism, of going to the
root. It takes
its theories
from those
who have sought to justify the impoverishment
of the masses, and its advocates generally teach
the preposterous
and degrading
doctrine
that
slavery was the first condition of labor.
It assumes that the tendency of wages to a minimum
is the
natural
law, and seeks
to
abolish
wages;
it assumes that the natural result of competition
is
to grind down workers, and seeks to abolish competition
by restrictions,
prohibitions and extensions
of governing power. Thus mistaking effects
for causes, and
childishly blaming the stone for hitting it,
it wastes strength in striving
for remedies that when not worse are futile.
Associated though it is
in many
places with democratic aspiration, yet its
essence is the same delusion to which the children
of Israel
yielded when against
the
protest
of their prophet they insisted on a king; the
delusion that has everywhere corrupted
democracies and enthroned tyrants — that
power over the people can be used for the
benefit of the
people; that
there
may be devised
machinery that through human agencies will
secure for the management of individual affairs
more
wisdom and
more virtue
than the
people themselves possess. This
superficiality and this tendency may be seen
in all the phases of socialism. ... read the whole letter