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.
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