A 58190 0
CONDET
HD
6338
G348
1892

וי
ARTES
1817
SCIENTIA
VERITAS
LIBRARY
OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
US UNUM
SEMURIBUS
TUEBOR
SI QUERIS PENINSULAM AMⱭNAM
CIRCUMSPICE
Se
Use late
HD
6338
.G348
1892
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR
AN OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIII.
AUTHOR OF
BY
HENRY GEORGE
"}
""
PROGRESS AND POVERTY,' THE LAND QUESTION, SOCIAL
PROBLEMS, PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE," ETC.
>> (C
WITH AN APPENDIX CONTAINING THE ENCYCLICAL OF
POPE LEO XIII. ON THE CONDITION OF LABOUR

SECOND
·ARDVA •QVÆ · PVLCRA
EDITION.
LONDON
SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO.
PATERNOSTER SQUARE
1892
!
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR
TO POPE LEO XIII.
Your Holiness,
I have read with care your
Encyclical letter on the condition of labour,
addressed, through the Patriarchs, Primates,
Archbishops, and Bishops of your faith, to the
Christian world.
Since its most strikingly pronounced condem-
nations are directed against a theory which
we who hold it know to be deserving of your
support, I ask permission to lay before your
Holiness the grounds of our belief, and to set
forth some considerations that you have unfor-
tunately overlooked. The momentous serious-
ness of the facts you refer to, the poverty,
suffering, and seething discontent that pervade
the Christian world, the danger that passion
may lead ignorance in a blind struggle against
social conditions rapidly becoming intolerable-
are my justification.
A
2
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
J
I.
OUR postulates are all stated or implied in
your Encyclical. They are the primary per-
ceptions of human reason, the fundamental
teachings of the Christian faith.
We hold: That-
This world is the creation of God.
The men brought into it for the brief period of
their earthly lives are the equal creatures of His
bounty, the equal subjects of His provident care.
By his constitution, man is beset by physical
wants, on the satisfaction of which depend, not
only the maintenance of his physical life, but
also the development of his intellectual and
spiritual life.
God has made the satisfaction of these wants
dependent on man's own exertions, giving him
the power, and laying on him the injunction,
to labour-a power that of itself raises him far
above the brute, since we may reverently say
that it enables him to become, as it were, a
helper in the creative work.
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
3
God has not put on man the task of making
bricks without straw. With the need for labour
and the power to labour He has also given to
man the material for labour. This material is
land-man physically being a land animal, who
can live only on and from land, and can use
other elements, such as air, sunshine, and water,
only by the use of land.
Being the equal creatures of the Creator,
equally entitled under His providence to live
their lives and satisfy their needs, men are equally
entitled to the use of land, and any adjustment
that denies this equal use of land is morally wrong.
As to right of ownership, we hold: That-
Being created individuals, with individual
wants and powers, men are individually entitled
(subject, of course, to the moral obligations that
arise from such relations as that of the family)
to the use of their own powers and the enjoy-
ment of the results.
There thus arises, anterior to human law, and
deriving its validity from the law of God, a
right of private ownership in things produced by
labour-a right that the possessor may transfer,
but of which to deprive him, without his will, is
theft.
4
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
This right of property, originating in the right
of the individual to himself, is the only full
and complete right of property. It attaches to
things produced by labour, but cannot attach tc
things created by God.
Thus, if a man take a fish from the ocean
he acquires a right of property in that fish,
which exclusive right he may transfer by sale
or gift. But he cannot obtain a similar right
of property in the ocean, so that he may sell
it, or give it, or forbid others to use it.
Or, if he set up a windmill, he acquires a
right of property in the things such use of
wind enables him to produce. But he cannot
claim a right of property in the wind itself,
so that he may sell it or forbid others to use
it.
Or, if he cultivate grain, he acquires a right
of property in the grain his labour brings forth.
But he cannot obtain a similar right of pro-
perty in the sun which ripened it or the soil
on which it grew. For these things are of
the continuing gifts of God to all generations
of men, which all may use, but none may claim
as his alone.
To attach to things created by God the same
right of private ownership that justly attaches
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
5
to things produced by labour, is to impair and
deny the true rights of property. For a man
who, out of the proceeds of his labour, is
obliged to pay another man for the use of
ocean or air or sunshine or soil, all of which
are to men involved in the single term land,
is in this deprived of his rightful property,
and thus robbed.
As to the use of land, we hold: That-
While the right of ownership that justly at-
taches to things produced by labour cannot
attach to land, there may attach to land a
right of possession. As your Holiness says,
"God has not granted the earth to mankind
in general in the sense that all without dis-
tinction can deal with it as they please," and
regulations necessary for its best use may be
fixed by human laws. But such regulations
must conform to the moral law-must secure
to all equal participation in the advantages of
God's general bounty. The principle is the
same as where a human father leaves property
equally to a number of children. Some of
the things thus left may be incapable of com-
mon use or of specific division. Such things
may properly be assigned to some of the child-
6
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
ren, but only under condition that the equality
of benefit among them all be preserved.
In the rudest social state, while industry
consists in hunting, fishing, and gathering the
spontaneous fruits of the earth, private pos-
session of land is not necessary.
But as men
begin to cultivate the ground and expend their
labour in permanent works, private possession
of the land on which labour is thus expended
is needed to secure the right of property in
the products of labour. For who would sow
if not assured of the exclusive possession needed
to enable him to reap? Who would attach
costly works to the soil without such exclu-
sive possession of the soil as would enable him
to secure the benefit?
This right of private possession in things
created by God is, however, very different from
the right of private ownership in things produced
by labour.
The one is limited, the other un-
limited, save in cases when the dictate of self-
preservation terminates all other rights. The
purpose of the one, the exclusive possession of
land, is merely to secure the other, the exclusive
ownership of the products of labour; and it can
never rightfully be carried so far as to impair or
deny this. While anyone may hold exclusive
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
7
possession of land so far as it does not interfere
with the equal rights of others, he can rightfully
hold it no farther.
Thus Cain and Abel, were there only two
men on earth, might by agreement divide the
earth between them. Under this compact each
might claim exclusive right to his share as
against the other. But neither could rightfully
continue such claim against the next man born.
For since no one comes into the world without
God's permission, his presence attests his equal
right to the use of God's bounty. For them to
refuse him any use of the earth which they had
divided between them would therefore be for
them to commit murder. And for them to re-
fuse him any use of the earth unless by labour-
ing for them, or by giving them part of the pro-
ducts of his labour he bought it of them, would
be for them to commit theft.
God's laws do not change. Though their ap-
plications may alter with altering conditions, the
same principles of right and wrong that hold
when men are few and industry is rude, also hold
amid teeming populations and complex indus-
tries. In our cities of millions and our States of
scores of millions, in a civilisation where the
8
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
00
division of labour has gone so far that large
numbers are hardly conscious that they are land
users, it still remains true that we are all land
animals, and can live only on land; and that
land is God's bounty to all, of which no one can
be deprived without being murdered, and for
which no one can be compelled to pay another
without being robbed. But even in a state of
society where the elaboration of industry and
the increase of permanent improvements have
made the need for private possession of land
widespread, there is no difficulty in conforming
individual possession with the equal right to
land. For as soon as any piece of land will
yield to the possessor a larger return than is had
by similar labour on other land, a value attaches
to it, which is shown when it is sold or rented.
Thus the value of the land itself, irrespective of
the value of any improvements in or on it, al-
ways indicates the precise value of the benefit
to which all are entitled in its use, as distin-
guished from the value which, as producer, or
successor of a producer, belongs to the possessor
in individual right.
To combine the advantages of private posses-
sion with the justice of common ownership, it is
only necessary, therefore, to take for common
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
9
:
uses what value attaches to land irrespective of
any exertion of labour on it. The principle is
the same as in the case referred to, where a
human father leaves equally to his children
things not susceptible of specific division or com-
mon use. In that case, such things would be
sold or rented, and the value equally applied.
It is on this common-sense principle that we,
who term ourselves single tax men, would
have the community act.
We do not propose to assert equal rights to
land by keeping land common,-letting anyone
use any part of it at any time. We do not pro-
pose the task, impossible in the present state of
society, of dividing land in equal shares; still
less the yet more impossible task of keeping it
so divided.
We propose leaving land in the private pos-
session of individuals, with full liberty on their
part to give, sell, or bequeath it, simply to levy
on it for public uses a tax that shall equal the
annual value of the land itself, irrespective of
the use made of it or the improvements on it.
And since this would provide amply for the
need of public revenues, we would accompany
this tax on land-values with the repeal of all
taxes now levied on the products and processes
ке
ΙΟ
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
of industry-which taxes, since they take from
the earnings of labour, we hold to be infringe-
ments of the right of property.
This we propose, not as a cunning device of
human ingenuity, but as a conforming of human
regulations to the will of God.
God cannot contradict himself nor impose on
His creatures laws that clash.
If it be God's command to men that they
should not steal that is to say, that they
should respect the right of property which each
one has in the fruits of his labour;
And if He be also the Father of all men, who,
in His common bounty, has intended all to have
equal opportunities for sharing;
Then, in any possible stage of human civilisa-
tion, however elaborate, there must be some
way in which the exclusive right to the pro-
ducts of industry may be reconciled with the
equal right to land.
If the Almighty be consistent with Himself, it
cannot be, as say those Socialists referred to by
you, that, in order to secure the equal participa-
tion of men in the opportunities of life and
labour, we must ignore the right of private pro-
perty. Nor yet can it be, as you yourself in the
Encyclical seem to argue, that, to secure the
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
II
right of private property, we must ignore the
equality of right in the opportunities of life and
labour. To say the one thing or the other is
equally to deny the harmony of God's laws.
But the private possession of land, subject to
the payment to the community of the value of
any special advantage thus given to the indiv-
idual, satisfies both laws, securing to all equal
participation in the bounties of the Creator, and
to each the full ownership of the products of
his labour.
Nor do we hesitate to say that this way of
securing the equal right to the bounty of the
Creator, and the exclusive right to the products.
of labour, is the way intended by God for
raising public revenues; for we are not Atheists,
who deny God, nor semi-Atheists, who deny
that He has any concern in politics and legisla-
tion.
It is true, as you say,-a salutary truth too
often forgotten,-that "man is older than the
State, and he holds the right of providing for
the life of his body prior to the formation of
any State." Yet, as you, too, perceive, it is also
true that the State is in the divinely appointed
order. For He who foresaw all things, and
12
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
provided for all things, foresaw and provided
that, with the increase of population and the
development of industry, the organisation of
human society into States or Governments would
become both expedient and necessary.
No sooner does the State arise than, as we
all know, it needs revenues. This need for
revenues is small at first, while population is
sparse, industry rude, and the functions of the
State few and simple. But, with growth of
population and advance of civilisation, the
functions of the State increase, and larger and
larger revenues are needed.
Now, He that made the world and placed
man in it, He that preordained civilisation as
the means whereby man might rise to higher
powers and become more and more conscious
of the works of his Creator, must have foreseen
this increasing need for State revenues, and have
made provision for it. That is to say: The
increasing need for public revenues with social
advance, being a natural, God-ordained need,
there must be a right way of raising them—
some way that we can truly say is the way
intended by God. It is clear that this right
way of raising public revenues must accord
with the moral law.
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
13
Hence :
It must not take from individuals what right-
fully belongs to individuals.
It must not give some an advantage over
others, as by increasing the prices of what some
have to sell and others must buy.
It must not lead men into temptation, by re-
quiring trivial oaths, by making it profitable to
lie, to swear falsely, to bribe, or to take bribes.
It must not confuse the distinctions of right
and wrong, and weaken the sanctions of religion
and the State, by creating crimes that are not
sins, and punishing men for doing what in itself
they have an undoubted right to do.
It must not repress industry. It must not
check commerce. It must not punish thrift.
It must offer no impediment to the largest pro-
duction and the fairest division of wealth.
Let me ask your Holiness to consider the
taxes on the processes and products of industry
by which, through the civilised world, public
revenues are collected-the octroi duties that
surround Italian cities with barriers; the mon-
strous customs duties that hamper intercourse
between so-called Christian States; the taxes on
occupations, on earnings, on investments, on the
building of houses, on the cultivation of fields,
14
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
on industry and thrift in all forms. Can these
be the ways God has intended that Governments
should raise the means they need? Have any
of them the characteristics indispensable in any
plan we can deem a right one?
All these taxes violate the moral law. They
take by force what belongs to the individual
alone; they give to the unscrupulous an advan-
tage over the scrupulous; they have the effect,
nay are largely intended, to increase the price
of what some have to sell and others must buy;
they corrupt government; they make oaths a
mockery; they shackle commerce; they fine
industry and thrift; they lessen the wealth that
men might enjoy, and enrich some by im-
poverishing others.
Yet what most strikingly shows how opposed
to Christianity is this system of raising public
revenues is its influence on thought.
Christianity teaches us that all men are
brethren that their true interests are harmon-
ious, not antagonistic. It gives us, as the golden
rule of life, that we should do to others as we
would have others do to us. But out of the
system of taxing the products and processes of
labour, and out of its effects in increasing the
price of what some have to sell and others must
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
15
buy, has grown the theory of "protection,"
which denies this gospel, which holds Christ
ignorant of political economy, and proclaims
laws of national well-being utterly at variance
with His teaching. This theory sanctifies national
hatreds; it inculcates a universal war of hostile
tariffs; it teaches peoples that their prosperity
lies in imposing, on the productions of other
peoples, restrictions they do not wish imposed
on their own; and instead of the Christian
doctrine of man's brotherhood, it makes injury
of foreigners a civic virtue.
66
By their fruits shall ye know them." Can
anything more clearly show that to tax the
products and processes of industry is not the
way God intended public revenues to be raised?
But to consider what we propose-the rais-
ing of public revenues by a single tax on the
value of land, irrespective of improvements-is
to see that in all respects this does conform to
the moral law.
Let me ask your Holiness to keep in mind
that the value we propose to tax-the value of
land irrespective of improvements-does not
come from any exertion of labour or investment
of capital on or in it; the values produced in
this way being values of improvements, which
16
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
we would exempt. The value of land, irrespec-
tive of improvement, is the value that attaches
to land by reason of increasing population and
social progress.
This is a value that always
goes to the owner as owner, and never does,
and never can, go to the user; for if the user
be a different person from the owner, he must
always pay the owner for it in rent or in pur-
chase-money, while if the user be also the
owner, it is as owner, not as user, that he re-
ceives it, and by selling or renting the land, he
can, as owner, continue to receive it, after he
ceases to be a user.
Thus taxes on land, irrespective of improve-
ment, cannot lessen the rewards of industry, nor
add to prices, nor in any way take from the
1 As to this point, it may be well to add that all econo-
mists are agreed that the taxes on land-values, irrespective
of improvement or use, or what, in the terminology of
political economy, is styled rent, a term distinguished from
the ordinary use of the word rent by being applied solely
to payments for the use of land itself,-must be paid by the
owner, and cannot be shifted by him on to the user.
To ex-
plain in another way the reason given in the text: Price is
not determined by the will of the seller or the will of the
buyer, but by the equation of demand and supply; and,
therefore, as to things constantly demanded and constantly
produced, rests at a point determined by the cost of produc-
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
17
individual what belongs to the individual. They
can only take the value that attaches to land by
the growth of the community, and which, there-
fore, belongs to the community as a whole.
tion—whatever tends to increase the cost of bringing fresh
quantities of such articles to the consumer, increasing price.
by checking supply; and whatever tends to reduce such cost,
decreasing price by increasing supply. Thus taxes on
wheat or sugar or tobacco add to the price that the con-
sumer must pay, and thus the cheapening in the cost of
producing steel, which improved processes have made in
recent years, has greatly reduced the price of steel. But
land has no cost of production, since it is created by God,
not produced by man. Its price, therefore, is fixed-1
(monopoly-rent), where land is held in close monopoly, by
what the owners can extract from the users under penalty
of deprivation and consequently of starvation, and amounts
to all that common labour can earn on it beyond what is
necessary to life; 2 (economic-rent-proper), where there is
no special monopoly, by what the particular land will yield
to common labour over and above what may be had by like
expenditure and exertion on land having no special advan-
tage, and for which no rent is paid; and 3 (speculative-
rent, which is a species of monopoly-rent, telling particu-
larly in selling-price), by the expectation of future increase
of value from social growth and improvement, which ex-
pectation, causing landowners to withhold land at present
prices, has the same effect as combination.
Taxes on land-values or economic-rent can therefore
never be shifted by the landowner to the land-user, since
they in no wise increase the demand for land, or enable land-
B
18
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
To take land-values for the State, abolishing
all taxes on the products of labour, would
therefore leave to the labourer the full produce
of labour; to the individual, all that rightfully
belongs to the individual. It would impose no
burden on industry, no check on commerce, not
punishment on thrift; it would secure the
largest production and the fairest distribution of
wealth, by leaving men free to produce and to
exchange as they please, without any artificial
enhancement of prices; and by taking for
public purposes a value that cannot be carried
off, that cannot be hidden, that of all values is
owners to check supply by withholding land from use.
Where rent depends on mere monopolisation—a case I men-
tion because rent may in this way be demanded for the use
of land even before economic or natural rent arises-the
taking by taxation of what the landowners were able to ex-
tort from labour could not enable them to extort any more,
since labourers, if not left enough to live on, will die. So
in the case of economic-rent-proper, to take from the land-
owners the premiums they receive, would in no way in-
crease the superiority of their land and the demand for it.
While, so far as price is affected by speculative-rent, to
compel the landowners to pay taxes on the value of land,
whether they were getting any income from it or not, would
make it more difficult for them to withhold land from use;
and to tax the full value would not merely destroy the
power, but the desire, to do so.
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
19
most easily ascertained and most certainly and
cheaply collected, it would enormously lessen
the number of officials, dispense with oaths, do
away with temptations to bribery and evasion,
and abolish man-made crimes, in themselves in-
nocent.
But farther: That God has intended the
State to obtain the revenues it needs by the taxa-
tion of land-values, is shown by the same order
and degree of evidence that shows that God has
intended the milk of the mother to be intended
for the nourishment of the babe.
See how close is the analogy. In that primi-
tive condition, ere the need for the State arises,
there are no land-values. The products of
labour have value, but in the sparsity of popu-
lation, no value as yet attaches to land itself.
But as increasing density of population and in-
creasing elaboration of industry necessitate the
organisation of the State, with its need for
revenues, value begins to attach to land. As
population still increases, and industry grows
more elaborate, so the needs for public revenues
increase. And at the same time, and from the
same causes, land-values increase. The connec-
tion is invariable. The value of things produced
20
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
by labour tends to decline with social develop-
ment, since the larger scale of production and the
improvement of processes tend steadily to re-
duce their cost. But the value of land, on
which population centres, goes up and up. Take
Rome, or Paris, or London, or New York, or
Melbourne. Consider the enormous value of
land in such cities, as compared with the value
of land in sparsely-settled parts of the same
countries. To what is this due? Is it not due
to the density and activity of the populations of
those cities to the very causes that require
great public expenditure for streets, drains,
public buildings, and all the many things needed
for the health, convenience, and safety of such
great cities? See how, with the growth of such
cities, the one thing that steadily increases in
value is land; how the opening of roads, the
building of railways, the making of any public
improvement, adds to the value of land. Is it
not clear that here is a natural law-that is to
say, a tendency willed by the Creator? Can it
mean anything else than that He who ordained
the State, with its needs, has, in the values which
attach to land, provided the means to meet those
needs?
That it does mean this and nothing else is
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
21
!
confirmed if we look deeper still, and inquire
not merely as to the intent, but as to the pur-
pose of the intent. If we do so, we may see in
this natural law, by which land-values increase
with the growth of society, not only such a
perfectly adapted provision for the needs of
society as gratifies our intellectual perceptions,
by showing us the wisdom of the Creator, but
a purpose, with regard to the individual, that
gratifies our moral perceptions by opening to us
a glimpse of His beneficence.
Consider: Here is a natural law by which, as
society advances, the one thing that increases in /
value is land—a natural law by virtue of which
all growth of population, all advance of the
arts, all general improvements of whatever kind,
add to a fund that both the commands of justice
and the dictates of expediency prompt us to
take for the common uses of society.
uses of society. Now,
since increase in the fund available for the
common uses of society is increase in the gain
that goes equally to each member of society, is
it not clear that the law by which land-values
increase with social advance, while the value of
the products of labour do not increase, tends,
with the advance of civilisation, to make the
share that goes equally to each member of
22
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
society more and more important, as compared
with what goes to him from his individual
earnings, and thus to make the advance of
civilisation lessen relatively the differences that,
in a ruder social state, must exist between the
strong and the weak, the fortunate and the un-
fortunate? Does it not show the purpose of
the Creator to be that the advance of man in
civilisation should be an advance, not merely to
larger powers, but to a greater and greater
equality, instead of what we, by our ignoring of
His intent, are making it,-an advance towards
a more and more monstrous inequality?
That the value attaching to land with social
growth is intended for social needs is shown by
the final proof. God is indeed a jealous God,
in the sense that nothing but injury and disaster
can attend the effort of men to do things other
than in the way He has intended; in the sense
that, where the blessings He proffers to men are
refused or misused, they turn to evils that
Scourge us. And just as for the mother to
withhold the provision that fills her breast with
the birth of the child is to endanger physical
health, so for society to refuse to take for
social uses the provision intended for them is
to breed social disease.
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
23
For refusal to take for public purposes the
increasing values that attach to land with social
growth, is to necessitate the getting of public
revenues by taxes that lessen production, dis-
tort distribution, and corrupt society. It is to
leave some to take what justly belongs to all;
it is to forego the only means by which it
is possible, in an advanced civilisation, to com-
bine the security of possession that is necessary
to improvement with the equality of natural
opportunity that is the most important of all
natural rights. It is thus at the basis of all
social life to set up an unjust inequality be-
tween man and man, compelling some to pay
others for the privilege of living, for the chance
of working, for the advantages of civilisation,
for the gifts of their God. But it is even more
than this.
The very robbery that the masses
of men thus suffer gives rise in advancing
communities to a new robbery. For the value
that, with the increase of population and social
advance, attaches to land, being suffered to go to
individuals who have secured ownership of the
land, it prompts to a forestalling of, and specu-
lation in, land wherever there is any prospect
of advancing population or prospective improve-
ment, thus producing an artificial scarcity of
24
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
the natural elements of life and labour, and a
strangulation of production, that shows itself
in recurring spasms of industrial depression as
disastrous to the world as destructive wars.
It is this that is driving men from the old
countries to the new countries, only to bring
there the same curses. It is this that causes
our material advance not merely to fail to im-
prove the condition of the mere worker, but
to make the condition of large classes positively
worse. It is this that, in our richest Christian
countries, is giving us a large population whose
lives are harder, more hopeless, more degraded
than those of the veriest savages. It is this
that leads so many men to think that God is
a bungler, and is constantly bringing more
people into His world than He has made pro-
vision for, or that there is no God, and that
belief in Him is a superstition which the facts
of life and the advance of science is dispel-
ling.
The darkness in light, the weakness in strength,
the poverty amid wealth, the seething discon-
tent, foreboding civil strife, that characterise our
civilisation of to-day, are the natural and in-
evitable results of our rejection of God's ben-
eficence, of our ignoring of His intent. Were
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
25
we, on the other hand, to follow His clear,
simple rule of right, leaving scrupulously to
the individual all that individual labour pro-
duces, and taking for the community the value
that attaches to land by the growth of the
community itself, not merely could evil modes
of raising public revenues be dispensed with,
but all men would be placed on an equal
level of opportunity with regard to the bounty
of their Creator, on an equal level of oppor-
tunity to exert their labour and to enjoy its
fruits. And then, without drastic or restric-
tive measures, the forestalling of land would
cease. For then the possession of land would
mean only security for the permanence of its
use, and there would be no object for any-
one to get land or to keep land except for
use, nor would his possession of better land
than others had confer any unjust advantage
on him, or unjust deprivation on them, since
the equivalent of the advantage would be taken
by the state for the benefit of all.
The Right Reverend Dr. Thomas Nulty,
Bishop of Meath, who sees all this as clearly
as we do, in pointing out to the clergy and
laity of his diocese the design of Divine Pro-
26
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
vidence that the rent of land should be taken
for the community,' says:
"I think, therefore, that I may fairly infer, on
the strength of authority as well as of reason,
that the people are, and always must be, the real
owners of the land of their country. This great
social fact appears to me to be of incalculable
importance, and it is fortunate, indeed, that, on
the strictest principles of justice, it is not clouded
even by a shadow of uncertainty or doubt.
There is, moreover, a charm and a peculiar
beauty in the clearness with which it reveals the
wisdom and the benevolence of the designs of
Providence in the admirable provision He has
made for the wants and the necessities of that
state of social existence of which He is author,
and in which the very instincts of nature tell us
we are to spend our lives. A vast public pro-
perty, a great national fund, has been placed
under the dominion and at the disposal of the
nation to supply itself abundantly with resources
necessary to liquidate the expenses of its govern-
ment, the administration of its laws and the
education of its youth, and to enable it to pro
1 Letter addressed to the Clergy and Laity of the Diocese
of Meath, Ireland, April 2, 1881.
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
27
vide for the suitable sustentation and support of
its criminal and pauper population. One of the
most interesting peculiarities of this property is
that its value is never stationary; it is constantly
progressive and increasing in a direct ratio to the
growth of the population, and the very causes
that increase and multiply the demands made on
it increase proportionately its ability to meet
them."
There is, indeed, as Bishop Nulty says, a
peculiar beauty in the clearness with which the
wisdom and benevolence of Providence are re-
vealed in this great social fact, the provision
made for the common needs of society in what
economists call the law of rent. Of all the
evidence that natural religion gives, it is this that
most clearly shows the existence of a beneficent
God, and most conclusively silences the doubts
that in our days lead so many to materialism.
For in this beautiful provision made by natural
law for the social needs of civilisation, we see
that God has intended civilisation; that all our
discoveries and inventions do not, and cannot,
outrun his forethought, and that steam, electricity,
and labour-saving appliances only make the great
moral laws clearer and more important. In the
28
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
growth of this great fund, increasing with social
advance-a fund that accrues from the growth
of the community, and belongs, therefore, to the
community-we see not only that there is no
need for the taxes that lessen wealth, that en-
gender corruption, that promote inequality and
teach men to deny the gospel; but that to take
this fund for the purpose for which it was
evidently intended, would, in the highest civilisa-
tion, secure to all the equal enjoyment of God's
bounty, the abundant opportunity to satisfy their
wants, and to provide amply for every legitimate
need of the State. We see that God in His
dealings with men has not been a bungler or a
niggard; that He has not brought too many men
into the world; that He has not neglected
abundantly to supply them; that He has not in-
tended that bitter competition of the masses for
a mere animal existence, and that monstrous
aggregation of wealth which characterises our
civilisation; but that these evils, which lead so
many to say there is no God, or yet more im-
piously to say that they are of God's ordering,
are due to our denial of His moral law. We
see that the law of justice, the law of the Golden
Rule, is not a mere counsel of perfection, but
indeed the law of social life. We see that, if
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
29
we were only to observe it, there would be work
for all, leisure for all, abundance for all; and
that civilisation would tend to give to the
poorest not only necessaries, but all comforts
and reasonable luxuries as well. We see that
Christ was not a mere dreamer when He told
men that, if they would seek the Kingdom of
God and its right doing, they might no more
worry about material things than do the lilies.
of the field about their raiment; but that He
was only declaring what political economy, in
the light of modern discovery, shows to be a
sober truth.
Your Holiness, even to see this, is deep and
lasting joy. For it is to see for one's self that
there is a God who lives and reigns, and that he
is a God of justice and love-Our Father, who
art in Heaven. It is to open a rift of sunlight
through the clouds of our darker questionings,
and to make the faith that trusts where it cannot
see, a living thing.
30
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
r
II.
YOUR HOLINESS will see from the explanation
I have given that the reform we propose, like
all true reforms, has both an ethical and an
economic side. By ignoring the ethical side,
and pushing our proposal merely as a reform
of taxation, we could avoid the objections that
arise from confounding ownership with possession,
and attributing to private property in land that
security of use and improvement that can be
had even better without it. All that we seek,
practically, is the legal abolition, as fast as pos-
sible, of taxes on the products and processes
of labour, and the consequent concentration of
taxation on land-values irrespective of improve-
ments. To put our proposals in this way would
be to urge them merely as a matter of wise
public expediency.
There are, indeed, many single tax men who
do put our proposals in this way; who, seeing
the beauty of our plan from a fiscal standpoint,
do not concern themselves farther.
But to
those who think as I do, the ethical is the
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
31
more important side. Not only do we not
wish to evade the question of private property
in land, but to us it seems that the beneficent
and far-reaching revolution we aim at is too
great a thing to be accomplished by "intelligent
self-interest," and can be carried by nothing less
than the religious conscience.
Hence we earnestly seek the judgment of
religion. This is the tribunal of which your
Holiness, as the head of the largest body of
Christians, is the most august representative.
It therefore behoves us to examine the
reasons you urge in support of private property
in land,—if they be sound, to accept them; and
if they be not sound, respectfully to point out
to you wherein is their error.
To your proposition that "Our first and
most fundamental principle, when we undertake
to alleviate the condition of the masses, must be
the inviolability of private property," we would
joyfully agree, if we could only understand you
to have in mind the moral element, and to mean
rightful private property, as when you speak
of marriage as ordained by God's authority
we may understand an implied exclusion of
improper marriages. Unfortunately, however,
other expressions show that you mean private
32
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
property in general, and have expressly in mind
private property in land. This confusion of
thought, this non-distribution of terms, runs
through your whole argument, leading you to
conclusions so unwarranted by your premises
as to be utterly repugnant to them, when, from
the moral sanction of private property in the
things produced by labour, you infer something
entirely different and utterly opposed,-a similar
right of property in the land created by God.
may there be im-
Private property is
in ownership by an
Private property is not of one species, and
moral sanction can no more be asserted uni-
versally of it than of marriage. That proper
marriage conforms to the law of God does not
justify the polygamic or polyandric or incestu-
ous marriages that are in some countries per-
mitted by the civil law.
And as there may
be immoral marriage, so
moral private property.
that which may be held
individual, or that which may be held in owner-
ship by an individual with the sanction of the
State. The mere lawyer, the mere servant of
the State, may rest here, refusing to distinguish
between what the State holds equally lawful.
Your Holiness, however, is not the servant of
the State, but the servant of God, the guardian
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
33
of morals. You know, as said by St. Thomas
of Aquin, that-
"Human law is law only in virtue of its ac-
cordance with right reason, and it is thus mani-
fest that it flows from the eternal law. And in
so far as it deviates from right reason, it is
called an unjust law. In such case it is not law
at all, but rather a species of violence."
Thus, that any species of property is per-
mitted by the State, does not of itself give it
moral sanction. The State has often made
things property that are not justly property,
but involve violence and robbery.
For in-
stance, the things of religion, the dignity and
authority of offices of the Church, the power of
administering her sacraments and controlling
her temporalities, have often, by profligate princes,
been given as saleable property to courtiers and
concubines. At this very day, in England, an
Atheist or a Heathen may buy in open market,
and hold, as legal property, to be sold, given, or
bequeathed as he pleases, the power of appoint-
ing to the cure of souls, and the value of these
legal rights of presentation is said to be no less.
than £17,000,000.
Or again: Slaves were universally treated as
C
34
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
property by the customs and laws of the classi-
cal nations, and were so acknowledged in
Europe long after the acceptance of Christian-
ity. At the beginning of this century there
was no Christian nation that did not, in her
colonies at least, recognise property in slaves,
and slave-ships crossed the seas under Christian
flags. In the United States, little more than
thirty years ago, to buy a man gave the same
legal ownership as to buy a horse; and in
Mohammedan countries, law and custom yet
make the slave the property of his captor or
purchaser.
Yet your Holiness, one of the glories of
whose pontificate is the attempt to break-up
slavery in its last strongholds, will not contend
that the moral sanction that attaches to property
in things produced by labour can, or ever could,
apply to property in slaves.
Your use, in so many passages of your En-
cyclical, of the inclusive term, property, or pri-
vate 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
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
35
speak merely of private property. With this
interpretation I find that the reasons you urge
for private property in land are eight. Let
me consider them in order of presentation.
You urge:
1. That what is bought with rightful property is
rightful property. (5.)¹
Clearly, purchase and sale cannot give, but
can only transfer ownership. Property that
in itself has no moral sanction does not obtain
moral sanction by passing from seller to buyer.
If right reason does not make the slave the
property of the slave-hunter, it does not make
him the property of the slave-buyer. Yet your
reasoning as to private property in land would
as well justify property in slaves. To show this
it is only needful to change in your argument
the word land to the word slave. It would
then read:
"It is surely undeniable that when a man
engages in remunerative labour the very reason
and motive of his work is to obtain property,
and to hold it in his own private possession.
1 To facilitate references the paragraphs of the Encyclical
are indicated by number.
36
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
"If one man hire out to another his strength
or his industry, he does this for the purpose of
receiving in return what is necessary for food
and living; he thereby expressly proposes to
acquire a full and noble right, not only to the
remuneration, but also to the disposal of that
remuneration as he pleases.
Thus, if he lives sparingly, saves money, and
invests his savings for greater security in a slave,
the slave, in such a case, is only his wages in
another form; and consequently a working
man's slave thus purchased should be as com-
pletely at his own disposal as the wages he re-
ceives for his labour."
Nor in turning your argument for private pro-
perty in land into an argument for private pro-
perty in men am I doing a new thing. In my
own country, in my own time, this very argu-
ment, that purchase gave ownership, was the
common defence of slavery. It was made by
statesmen, by jurists, by clergymen, by bishops;
it was accepted over the whole country by the
great mass of the people. By it was justified the
separation of wives from husbands, of children
from parents, the compelling of labour, the ap-
propriation of its fruits, the buying and selling
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
37
of Christians by Christians. In language almost
identical with yours it was asked, "Here is a
poor man who has worked hard, lived sparingly,
and invested his savings in a few slaves. Would
you rob him of his earnings by liberating those
slaves?" Or it was said:
"Here is a poor
widow; all her husband has been able to leave
her is a few negroes, the earnings of his hard
toil. Would you rob the widow and the
orphan by freeing these negroes?" And
because of this perversion of reason, this
confounding of unjust property rights with
just property rights, this acceptance of man's
law as though it were God's law, there
came on our nation a judgment of fire and
blood.
The error of our people in thinking that what,
in itself was not rightful property, could be-
come rightful property by purchase and sale, is
the same error into which your Holiness falls.
It is not merely formally the same; it is essen-
tially the same. Private property in land, no
less than private property in slaves, is the vio-
lation of the true rights of property. They are
different forms of the same robbery-twin de-
vices, by which the perverted ingenuity of man
has sought to enable the strong and the cunning
38
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
to escape God's requirement of labour, by forc-
ing it on others.
What difference does it make whether I
merely own the land on which another man
must live or own the man himself? Am I not
in the one case as much his master as in the
other? Can I not compel him to work for
me? Can I not take to myself as much of the
fruits of his labour-as fully dictate his actions?
Have I not over him the power of life and
death? For to deprive a man of land is as
certain to kill him as to deprive him of blood
by opening his veins, or of air by tightening a
halter around his neck.
The essence of slavery is in empowering one
man to obtain the labour of another without re-
compense. Private property in land does this
as fully as chattel-slavery. The slave-owner
must leave to the slave enough of his earnings
to enable him to live. Are there not, in so-
called free countries, great bodies of working-
men who get no more? How much more of
the fruits of their toil do the agricultural
labourers of Italy and England get than did the
slaves of our Southern States? Did not pri-
vate property in land permit the landowner of
Europe in ruder times to demand the jus primæ
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
39
noctis? Does not the same last outrage exist
to-day in diffused form in the immorality born
of monstrous wealth on the one hand and
ghastly poverty on the other?
In what did the slavery of Russia consist but
in giving to the master land on which the serf
was forced to live? When an Ivan or a Cath-
erine enriched their favourites with the labour
of others they did not give men, they gave land.
And when the appropriation of land has gone
so far that no free land remains to which the
landless man may turn, then, without further
violence, the more insidious form of labour-
robbery involved in private property in land
takes the place of chattel-slavery, because more
economical and convenient. For under it the
slave does not have to be caught or held, or to
be fed when not needed. He comes of himself,
begging the privilege of serving, and, when no
longer wanted, can be discharged. The lash is
unnecessary; hunger is as efficacious. This is
why the Norman conquerors of England, and
the English conquerors of Ireland, did not
divide up the people, but divided the land.
This is why European slave ships took their
cargoes to the New World, not to Europe.
Slavery is not yet abolished. Though in all
40
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
Christian countries its ruder form has now gone,
it still exists in the heart of our civilisation in
a more insidious form, and is increasing. There
is work to be done for the glory of God and
the liberty of man by other soldiers of the
cross than those warrior monks whom, with
the blessing
blessing of your Holiness, Cardinal
Lavigerie is sending into the Sahara. Yet
your Encyclical employs in defence of one
form of slavery the same fallacies that the
apologists for chattel-slavery used in defence
of the others!
The Arabs are not wanting in acumen. Your
Encyclical reaches far. What shall your war-
rior monks say, if, when at the muzzle of their
rifles they demand of some Arab slave merchant
his miserable caravan, he shall declare that he
bought them with his savings, and, producing a
copy of your Encyclical, shall prove by your
reasoning that his slaves are consequently "only
his wages in another form," and ask if they who
bear your blessing and own your authority pro-
pose to “deprive him of the liberty of disposing
of his wages, and thus of all hope and possibility
of increasing his stock and bettering his con-
dition in life?"
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
41
2. That private property in land proceeds from
man's gift of reason. (7-8.)
In the second place, your Holiness argues that
man, possessing reason and forethought, may not
only acquire ownership of the fruits of the earth,
but also of the earth itself, so that out of its pro-
ducts he may make provision for the future.
Reason, with its attendant forethought, is in-
deed the distinguishing attribute of man, that
which raises him above the brute, and shows,
as the Scriptures declare, that he is created in
the likeness of God. And this gift of reason
does,—as your Holiness points out,-involve the
need and right of private property in whatever
is produced by the exertion of reason and its
attendant forethought, as well as in what is pro-
duced by physical labour. In truth, these ele-
ments of man's production are inseparable, and
labour involves the use of reason. It is by his
reason that man differs from the animals in
being a producer, and in this sense a maker.
Of themselves his physical powers are slight,
forming, as it were, but the connection by which
the mind takes hold of material things, so as to
utilise to its will the matter and forces of nature.
42
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
It is mind, the intelligent reason, that is the mover
in labour, the essential agent in production.
The right of private ownership does therefore
indisputably attach to things provided by man's
reason and forethought. But it cannot attach
to things provided by the reason and fore-
thought of God!
To illustrate: Let us suppose a company
travelling through the desert as the Israelites
travelled from Egypt. Such of them as had
the forethought to provide themselves with
vessels of water would acquire a just right of
property in the water so carried; and in the
thirst of the waterless desert, those who had
neglected to provide themselves, though they
might ask water from the provident in charity,
could not demand it in right. For while water
itself is of the providence of God, the presence
of this water in such vessels, at such place, re-
sults from the providence of the men who car-
ried it. Thus they have to it an exclusive right.
But suppose others use their forethought in
pushing ahead and appropriating the springs,
refusing, when their fellows come up, to let them
drink of the water save as they buy it of them.
Would such forethought give any right?
Your Holiness, it is not the forethought of
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
43
carrying water where it is needed, but the fore-
thought of seizing springs, that you seek to
defend in defending the private ownership of
land!
Let me show this more fully, since it may be
worth while to meet those who say that, if
private property in land be not just, then
private property in the products of labour is
not just, since the material of these products
is taken from land. It will be seen, on con-
sideration, that all of man's production is ana-
logous to such transportation of water as we
have supposed. In growing grain, or smelting
metals, or building houses, or weaving cloth, or
doing any of the things that constitute produc-
tion, all that man does is to change in place or
form pre-existing matter. As a producer, man
is merely a changer, not a creator; God alone
creates. And since the changes in which man's
production consists inhere in matter so long
as they persist, the right of private ownership
attaches the accident to the essence, and gives
the right of ownership in that natural material
in which the labour of production is embodied.
Thus water, which, in its original form and place,
is the common gift of God to all men, when
drawn from its natural reservoir and brought
44
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
into the desert, passes rightfully into the owner-
ship of the individual who, by changing its place,
has produced it there.
But such right of ownership is in reality a
mere right of temporary possession; for though
man may take material from the storehouse of
Nature and change it in place or form to suit
his desires, yet, from the moment he takes it, it
tends back to that storehouse again. Wood
decays, iron rusts, stone disintegrates and is
displaced, while, of more perishable products,
some will last for only a few months, others for
only a few days, and some disappear immediately
on use. Though, so far as we can see, matter
is eternal, and force forever persists; though we
can neither annihilate nor create the tiniest mote
that floats in a sunbeam, or the faintest impulse
that stirs a leaf, yet in the ceaseless flux of
Nature, man's work of moving and combining
constantly passes away. Thus the recognition
of the ownership of what natural material is
embodied in the products of man never con-
stitutes more than temporary possession-never
interferes with the reservoir provided for all.
As taking water from one place and carrying
it to another place by no means lessens the store
of water, since, whether it is drunk or spilled or
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
45
left to evaporate, it must return again to the
natural reservoirs-so is it with all things on
which man, in production, can lay the impress of
his labour.
Hence, when you say that man's reason puts
it within his right to have in stable and per-
manent possession not only things that perish in
the using, but also those that remain for use in
the future, you are right in so far as you may
include such things as buildings, which, with
repair, will last for generations, with such things
as food or firewood, which are destroyed in the
use. But when you infer that man can have
private ownership in those permanent things of
Nature that are the reservoirs from which all
must draw, you are clearly wrong. Man may,
indeed, hold in private ownership the fruits of
the earth produced by his labour, since they lose
in time the impress of that labour, and pass
again into the natural reservoirs from which
they were taken, and thus the ownership of
them by one works no injury to others. But he
cannot so own the earth itself, for that is the
reservoir from which must constantly be drawn
not only the material with which alone men can
produce, but even their very bodies.
The conclusive reason why man cannot claim
46
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
རྞ、
ownership in the earth itself, as he can in the
fruits that he, by labour, brings forth from it, is
in the facts stated by you in the very next para-
graph (9), when you truly say,-
"Man's needs do not die out, but recur;
satisfied to-day, they demand new supplies to-
morrow. Nature, therefore, owes to man a store-
house that shall never fail the daily supply of his
daily wants. And this he finds only in the inex-
haustible fertility of the earth."
By man you mean all men.
Can what Nature
owes to all men be made the private property
of some men, from which they may debar all
other men?
Let me dwell on the words of your Holiness.
"Nature, therefore, owes to man a storehouse
that shall never fail." By Nature you mean
God. Thus your thought, that in creating us
God himself has incurred an obligation to
provide us with a storehouse that shall never
fail, is the same as is thus expressed and carried
to its irresistible conclusion by the Bishop of
Meath:
"God was perfectly free in the act by which
He created us; but, having created us, He bound
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
47
himself by that act to provide us with the means
necessary for our subsistence. The land is the only
source of this kind now known to us. The land,
therefore, of every country is the common property
of the people of that country, because its real
owner, the Creator who made it, has transferred.
it as a voluntary gift to them. 'Terram autem
dedit filiis hominum.' Now, as every individual
in that country is a creature and child of God,
and as all His creatures are equal in His sight,
any settlement of the land of a country that
would exclude the humblest man in that country
from his share of the common inheritance, would
be NOT ONLY AN INJUSTICE AND A WRONG TO THAT
MAN, BUT, MOREOVER, WOULD BE AN IMPIOUS
RESISTANCE TO THE
THE BENEVOLENT
INTENTIONS OF HIS CREATOR."
3. That private property in land deprives no one
of the use of land. (9.)
Your own statement, that land is the in-
exhaustible storehouse that God owes to man,
must have aroused in your Holiness's mind an
uneasy questioning of its appropriation as private
property; for, as though to reassure yourself, you
proceed to argue that its ownership by some will
48
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
not injure others. You say, in substance, that
even though divided among private owners, the
earth does not cease to minister to the needs of
all, since those who do not possess the soil can,
by selling their labour, obtain in payment the
produce of the land.
Suppose that to your Holiness as a judge of
morals one should put this case of conscience:
"I am one of several children to whom our
father left a field abundant for our support. As
he assigned no part of it to any one of us in
particular, leaving the limits of our separate
possession to be fixed by ourselves, I, being the
eldest, took the whole field in exclusive owner-
ship. But, in doing so, I have not deprived my
brothers of their support from it, for I have
let them work for me on it, paying them
from the produce as much wages as I would
have had to pay strangers. Is there any reason
why my conscience should not be clear?"
What would be your answer? Would you
not tell him that he was in mortal sin, and that
his excuse added to his guilt? Would you not
call on him to make restitution and to do
penance?
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
49
Or, suppose that, as a temporal prince, your
Holiness were ruler of a rainless land, such as
Egypt, where there were no springs or brooks,
their want being supplied by a bountiful river
like the Nile. Supposing that, having sent a
number of your subjects to make fruitful this
land, bidding them do justly and prosper, you
were told that some of them had set up a claim
of ownership in the river, refusing the others a
drop of water, except as they bought it of them;
and that thus they had become rich without
work, while the others, though working hard,
were so impoverished by paying for water as to
be hardly able to exist.
Would not your indignation wax hot when
this was told?
Suppose that then the river-owners should
send to you and thus excuse their action:
"The river, though divided among private
owners, ceases not thereby to minister to the
needs of all, for there is no one who drinks who
does not drink of the water of the river. Those
who do not possess the water of the river con-
tribute their labour to get it; so that it may be
truly said that all water is supplied either from
one's own river, or from some laborious industry
D
50
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
which is paid for either in the water, on in that
which is exchanged for the water."
Would the indignation of your Holiness be
abated? Would it not wax fiercer yet for the
insult to your intelligence of this excuse?
I do not need more formally to show your
Holiness that between utterly depriving a man
of God's gifts, and depriving him of God's gifts
unless he will buy them, is merely the difference
between the robber who leaves his victim to die
and the robber who puts him to ransom. But I
would like to point out how your statement that
"the earth, though divided among private owners,
ceases not thereby to minister to the needs of
all," overlooks the largest facts.
From your palace of the Vatican the eye may
rest on the expanse of the Campagna, where the
pious toil of religious congregations and the
efforts of the State are only now beginning to
make it possible for men to live. Once that
expanse was tilled by thriving husbandmen and
dotted with smiling hamlets. What for centuries
has condemned it to desertion? History tells
us. It was private property in land; the growth
of the great estates of which Pliny saw that
ancient Italy was perishing; the cause that, by
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
51
bringing failure to the crop of men, let in the
Goths and Vandals, gave Roman Britain to the
worship of Odin and Thor, and, in what were
once the rich and populous provinces of the East,
shivered the thinned ranks and palsied arms of
the legions on the scimitars of Mohammedan
hordes, and in the sepulchre of our Lord and
in the Church of St. Sophia trampled the cross
to rear the crescent!
If you go to Scotland you may see great tracts
that, under the Gaelic tenure, which recognised the
right of each to a foothold in the soil, bred sturdy
men, but that now, under the recognition of private
property in land, are given up to wild animals.
If you go to Ireland your Bishops will show you,
on lands where now only beasts graze, the traces
of hamlets that, when they were young priests,
were filled with honest, kindly, religious people.
If you will come to the United States you will
find, in a land wide enough and rich enough to
support in comfort the whole population of
Europe, the growth of a sentiment that looks
with evil eye on immigration, because the arti-
ficial scarcity that results from private property
in land makes it seem as if there were not room
enough and work enough for those already here.
Or go to the Antipodes, and in Australia as in
52
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
England, you may see that private property in
land is operating to leave the land barren and to
crowd the bulk of the population into great
cities. Go wherever you please where the forces
loosed by modern invention are beginning to be
felt, and you may see that private property in
land is the curse, denounced by the prophet, that
prompts men to lay field to field till they "alone
dwell in the midst of the earth.'
To the mere materialist this is sin and shame.
Shall we to whom this world is God's world-
we who hold that man is called to this life, only
as a prelude to a higher life-shall we defend it?
4. That industry expended on land gives owner-
ship in the land itself. (10, .11)
Your Holiness next contends that industry ex-
pended on land gives a right to ownership of the
land, and that the improvement of land creates
benefits indistinguishable and inseparable from
the land itself.
This contention, if valid, could only justify the
ownership of land by those who expend industry
on it. This would not justify private property
in land as it exists. On the contrary, it would
justify a gigantic no-rent declaration that would
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
53
take land from those who now legally own it,
the landlords, and turn it over to the tenants and
labourers. And if it also be that improvements
cannot be distinguished and separated from the
land itself, how could the landlords claim con-
sideration even for improvements they had made?
But your Holiness cannot mean what your
words imply. What you really mean, I take it,
is that the original justification and title of land
ownership is in the expenditure of labour on it.
But neither can this justify private property in
land as it exists. For is it not all but universally
true that existing land titles do not come from
use, but from force or fraud ?
Take Italy! Is it not true that the greater
part of the land of Italy is held by those who, so
far from ever having expended industry on it,
have been mere appropriators of the industry of
those who have? Is this not also true of Great
Britain and of other countries? Even in the
United States, where the forces of concentration
have not yet had time to fully operate and there
has been some attempt to give land to users, it is
probably true to-day that the greater part of the
land is held by those who neither use it nor pro-
pose to use it themselves, but merely hold it to
compel others to pay them for permission to use it.
54
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
And if industry gives ownership to land, what
are the limits of this ownership? If a man may
acquire the ownership of several square miles of
land by grazing sheep on it, does this give to him
and his heirs the ownership of the same land
when it is found to contain rich mines, or when
by the growth of population and the progress of
society it is needed for farming, for gardening,
for the close occupation of a great city? Is it
on the rights given by the industry of those who
first used it for grazing cows or growing potatoes
that would found the title to the land now
covered by the city of New York and having a
value of thousands of millions of dollars?
you
But your contention is not valid within any
limits or to any extent. Industry expanded on
the land gives a right of ownership in the fruits
of that industry, but not in the land itself, just as
industry expended on the ocean would give a
right of ownership to the fish taken by it, but not
a right of ownership in the ocean. Nor yet is it
true that private ownership of land is necessary
to secure the fruits of labour on land; nor does
the improvement of land create benefits indis-
tinguishable and inseparable from the land itself.
That secure possession is necessary to the use and
improvement of land, I have already explained,
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
55
but that ownership is not necessary is shown by
the fact that in all civilised countries land owned
by one person is cultivated and improved by
other persons.
Most of the cultivated land in
the British Islands, as in Italy and other countries,
is cultivated not by owners but by tenants. And
so the costliest buildings are erected by those
who are not owners of the land, but who have
from the owner a mere right of possession for a
time on condition of certain payments. Nearly
the whole of London has been built in this way,
and in New York, Chicago, Denver, San
Francisco, Sydney and Melbourne, as well as in
continental cities, the owners of many of the
largest edifices will be found to be different
persons from the owners of the ground. So far
from the value of improvements being inseparable
from the value of land, it is in individual trans-
actions constantly separated. For instance, one-
half of the land on which the immense Grand
Pacific Hotel in Chicago stands was recently
separately sold, and in Ceylon it is a not in-
frequent occurrence for one person to own a
fruit tree and another to own the ground in which
it is implanted.
There is, indeed, no improvement of land,
whether it be clearing, plowing, manuring,
56
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
cultivating, the digging of cellars, the opening of
wells, or the building of houses, that so long as
its usefulness continues does not have a value.
clearly distinguishable from the value of the
land. For land having such improvements will
always sell or rent for more than similar land
without them.
And
If, therefore, the State levy a tax equal to what
the land, irrespective of improvement, would bring,
it will take the benefits of mere ownership, but
will leave the full benefits of use and improvement,
which the prevailing systems do not do.
since the holder, who would still in form continue
to be the owner, could at any time give or sell
both possession and improvements, subject to
future assessment by the State on the value of the
land alone, he will be perfectly free to retain or
dispose of the full amount of property that the
exertion of his labour or the investment of his
capital has attached to or stored up in the land.
Thus, what we propose would secure, as it is
impossible in any other way to secure, what you
properly say is just and right-" that the results
of labour should belong to him who has
laboured." But private property in land-to
allow the holder without adequate payment to
the State to take for himself the benefit of the
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
57
value that attaches to land with social growth
and improvement-does take the results of
labour from him who has laboured, does turn
over the fruits of one man's labour to be en-
joyed by another. For labour, as the active
factor, is the producer of all wealth. Mere
ownership produces nothing. A man might own
a world, but so sure is the decree that "by the
sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread," that
without labour he could not get a meal or pro-
vide himself a garment. Hence, when the
owners of land, by virtue of their ownership
and without labouring themselves, get the pro-
ducts of labour in abundance, these things must
come from the labour of others, must be the
fruits of others' sweat, taken from those who
have a right to them, and enjoyed by those who
have no right to them.
The only utility of private ownership of land
as distinguished from possession, is the evil utility
of giving to the owner products of labour he
does not earn. For until land will yield to its
owner some return beyond that of the labour
and capital he expends on it-that is to say,
until by sale or rental he can, without expendi-
ture of labour, obtain from it products of labour
-ownership amounts to no more than security
58
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
of possession, and has no value. Its importance
and value begin only when, either in the present
or prospectively, it will yield a revenue-that is
to say, will enable the owner as owner to obtain
products of labour without exertion on his part,
and thus to enjoy the results of others' labour.
What largely keeps men from realising the
robbery involved in private property in land is
that in the most striking cases the robbery is not
of individuals, but of the community, since, as I
have before explained, it is impossible for rent
in the economic sense-that value which attaches
to land by reason of social growth and improve.
ment--to go to the user. It can go only to the
owner or to the community. Thus those who
pay enormous rents for the use of land in such
centres as London or New York are not in-
dividually injured. Individually they get a
return for what they pay, and must feel that
they have no better right to the use of such
peculiarly advantageous localities without paying
for it than have thousands of others. And so not
thinking, or not caring for the interests of the com-
munity, they make no objection to the system.
It recently came to light in New York that a
man, having no title whatever, had been for years
collecting rents on a piece of land that the
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
59
growth of the city had made very valuable.
Those who paid these rents had never stopped
to ask whether he had any right to them. They
felt that they had no right to land that so many
others would like to have without paying for it,
and did not think of, or did not care for, the
rights of all.
5. The private property in land has the support
of the common opinion of mankind, and has con-
duced to peace and tranquillity, and that it is sanc-
tioned by the Divine Law. (12).
Even were it true that the common opinion
of mankind has sanctioned private property in
land, this would no more prove its justice than
the once universal practice of the known world
would have proved the justice of slavery.
But it is not true. Examination will show
that wherever we can trace them, the first per-
ceptions of mankind have always recognised the
equality of right to land, and that when in-
dividual possession became necessary to secure
the right of ownership in things produced by
labour, some method of securing equality,
sufficient in the existing state of social develop-
ment, was adopted. Thus, among some peoples,
60
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
land used for cultivation was periodically divided,
land used for pasturage and wood being held in
common. Among others, every family was
permitted to hold what land it needed for a
dwelling and for cultivation, but the moment
that such use and cultivation stopped, any one
else could step in and take it on like tenure.
Of the same nature were the land laws of the
Mosaic code. The land, first fairly divided
among the people, was made inalienable by the
provision of the jubilee, under which, if sold, it
reverted every fiftieth year to the children of its
original possessors.
Private property in land as we know it, the
attaching to land of the same right of ownership
that justly attaches to the products of labour,
has never grown up anywhere save by usurpation
or force. Like slavery, it is the result of war.
It comes to us of the modern world from your
ancestors, the Romans, whose civilisation it cor-
rupted and whose empire it destroyed.
It made with the freer spirit of the northern
peoples the combination of the feudal system, in
which, though subordination was substituted for
equality, there was still a rough recognition of
the principle of common rights in land. A fief
was a trust, and to enjoyment was annexed some
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
61
obligation. The sovereign, the representative of
the whole people, was the only owner of land.
Of him, immediately or mediately, held tenants,
whose possession involved duties or payments,
which, though rudely and imperfectly, embodied
the idea that we would carry out in the single
tax, of taking land-values for public uses. The
Crown lands maintained the sovereign and the
civil list, the Church lands defrayed the cost of
public worship and instruction, of the relief of
the sick, the destitute, and the way worn, while
the military tenures provided for public defence
and bore the costs of war. A fourth and very
large portion of the land remained in common,
the people of the neighbourhood being free to
pasture it, cut wood on it, or put it to other
common uses.
In this partial yet substantial recognition of
common rights to land is to be found the reason
why, in a time when the industrial arts were
rude, wars frequent, and the great discoveries
and inventions of our time unthought of, the
condition of the labourer was devoid of that
grinding poverty which, despite our marvellous
advances, now exists. Speaking of England, the
highest authority on such subjects, the late
Professor Thorold Rogers, declares that in the
62
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
thirteenth century there was no class so poor, so
helpless, so pressed and degraded as are millions
of Englishmen in our boasted nineteenth cen-
tury, and that, save in times of actual famine,
there was no labourer so poor as to fear that
his wife and children might come to want even
were he taken from them. Dark and rude in
many respects as they were, these were the
times when the cathedrals and churches and
religious houses, whose ruins yet excite our ad-
miration, were built, the times when England
had no national debt, no poor law, no standing
army, no hereditary paupers, no thousands and
thousands of human beings rising in the morn-
ing without knowing where they might lay
their heads at night.
With the decay of the feudal system, the
system of private property in land that de-
stroyed Rome was extended. As to England, it
may briefly be said that the Crown lands were
for the most part given away to favourites;
that the Church lands were parcelled among his
courtiers by Henry VIII., and in Scotland
grasped by the nobles; that the military dues
were finally remitted in the seventeenth century,
and taxation on consumption substituted; and
that by a process beginning with the Tudors
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
63
and extending to our own time, all but a mere
fraction of the commons were enclosed by the
greater landowners, while the same private
ownership of land was extended over Ireland
and the Scottish Highlands, partly by the sword
and partly by bribery of the chiefs. Even the
military dues, had they been commuted, not re-
mitted, would to-day have more than sufficed
to pay all public expenses without one penny of
other taxation.
Of the New World, whose institutions but
continue those of Europe, it is only necessary to
say that to the parcelling out of land in great
tracts is due the backwardness and turbu-
lence of Spanish America; that to the large
plantations of the southern States of the Union
was due the persistence of slavery there, and
that the more northern settlements showed the
earlier English feeling, land being fairly well
divided, and the attempts to establish manorial
estates coming to little or nothing. In this lies
the secret of the more vigorous growth of the
northern States. But the idea that land was to
be treated as private property had been thor-
oughly established in English thought before
the colonial period ended, and it has been so
treated by the United States and by the several
64
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
States. And though land was at first sold
cheaply, and then given to actual settlers, it
was also sold in large quantities to speculators,
given away in great tracts for railroads and
other purposes, until now the public domain of
the United States, which, a generation ago,
seemed illimitable, has practically gone.
And
this, as the experience of other countries shows,
is the natural result in a growing community of
making land private property. When the pos-
session of land means the gain of unearned
wealth, the strong and unscrupulous will secure
it. But when, as we propose, economic rent,
the "unearned increment of wealth," is taken
by the State for the use of the community, then
land will pass into the hands of users and re-
main there, since, no matter how great its value,
its possession will only be profitable to users.
As to private property in land having con-
duced to the peace and tranquillity of human
life, it is not necessary more than to allude to
the notorious fact that the struggle for land has
been the prolific source of wars and of lawsuits,
while it is the poverty engendered by private
property in land that makes the prison and the
workhouse the unfailing attributes of what we
call Christian civilisation.
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
65
Your Holiness intimates that the Divine
Law gives its sanction to the private owner-
ship of land, quoting from Deuteronomy,
"Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife;
nor his house, nor his field, nor his man-servant,
nor his maid-servant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor
anything which is his."
If, as your Holiness conveys, this inclusion of -
the words, "nor his field," is to be taken as
sanctioning private property in land as it exists
to-day, then, but with far greater force, must
the words, "nor his man-servant, nor his maid-
servant," be taken to sanction chattel slavery,
for it is evident from other provisions of the
same code that these terms refer both to bonds-
men for a term of years and to perpetual slaves.
But the word "field" involves the idea of use
and improvement, to which the right of posses-
sion and ownership attaches without recognition
of property in the land itself. And that this re-
ference to the field is not the sanction of private
property in land as it exists to-day is proved by
the fact that the Mosaic code expressly denied
such unqualified ownership, and with the de-
claration, "The land also shall not be sold for-
ever because it is mine, and you are strangers
and sojourners with me," provided for its rever-
E
66
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
sion every fiftieth year, thus, in a way adapted
to the primitive industrial conditions of the
people and time, preventing men from being de-
prived of a foothold in the soil.
Nowhere, in fact, throughout the Scriptures
can the slightest justification be found for the
attaching to land of the same right of property
that justly attaches to the things produced by
labour. Everywhere is it treated as the free
bounty of God, as "The land which the Lord
thy God giveth thee.”
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 pro-
perty 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 necessities for
those whom he has begotten; and similarly
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
67
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 need-
ful to enable them honourably to keep them -
selves 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 genera-
tions 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 com-
pared with our constant need for the providence
68
THE CONDITION of LABOUR.
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
through Him the generations of men exist.
Let the mean temperature of the earth rise or
fall a few degrees, an amount as nothing com-
pared with differences produced in our labora-
tories, and mankind would disappear as ice
disappears under a tropical sun, would fall as
the leaves fall at the touch of frost.
The duty of fathers to transmit to their child-
ren 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 civilised world all told amounts to anything
like as much as one year's labour, while it is
certain that if labour were to stop and men had
to rely on existing accumulation, it would be
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
69
Holiness refers
Now profitable
agree, is land
only a few days ere in the richest countries pes-
tilence and famine would stalk.
The profitable property your
to, is private property in land.
land, as all economists will
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 per-
mit the owner to appropriate. the products of
labour without doing labour, 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 con-
70
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
demn the great masses of men to want and
misery, that the natural conditions of our mor-
tal 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 child-
ren, and probably a large majority do not
leave enough to bury them!
ren are left by their fathers
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 per-
mission 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.
Some few child-
richer than it is
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 honour-
ably to keep themselves from want and misery.
That is God's business. We no more create our
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
71
It is God
children than we create our fathers.
who is the Creator of each succeeding genera-
tion, 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 fer-
tility 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 de-
veloped mind, habits of virtue, piety, and indus-
try, 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,
72
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
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
labour 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 heart-burnings 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 to-day in lazzaroni, and that the descend-
ants 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
labour would go to the labourer, it would be
within the ability of all to make more than a
comfortable living with reasonable labour.
And for those who might be crippled or incapa-
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
73
citated, or deprived of their natural protectors
and bread-winners, the most ample provision
could be made out of that great and increasing
fund with which God in His law of rent has pro-
vided 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 ob-
ligation to the child, instead of giving any sup-
port to private property in land, utterly con-
demns it, urging us by the most powerful
considerations to abolish it in the simple and
efficacious way of the single tax.
to
This duty of the father, this obligation
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 re-
sponsibilities 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 to-day is the result of private pro-
74
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
perty in land in the richest of so-called Chris-
tian 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, unde-
veloped 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!
7. That the private ownership of land stimulates
industry, increases wealth, and attaches men to the
soil and to their country. (51.)
The idea, as expressed by Arthur Young, that
"the magic of property turns barren sands to
gold," springs from the confusion of ownership
with possession, of which I have before spoken,
that attributes to private property in land what
is due to security of the products of labour. It
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
75
is needless for me again to point out that the
change we propose, the taxation for public uses
of land-values, or economic rent, and the aboli-
tion of other taxes, would give to the user of
land far greater security for the fruits of his
labour than the present system, and far greater
permanence of possession. Nor is it necessary
further to show how it would give homes to
those who are now homeless, and bind men to
their country. For under it every one who
wanted a piece of land for a home or for pro-
ductive use could get it without purchase-price
and hold it even without tax, since the tax we
propose would not fall on all land, nor even on
all land in use, but only on land better than the
poorest land in use, and is in reality not a tax
at all, but merely a return to the State for the
use of a valuable privilege. And even those
who from circumstances or occupation did not
wish to make permanent use of land would still
have an equal interest with all others in the land
of their country and in the general prosperity.
But I should like your Holiness to consider
how utterly unnatural is the condition of the
masses in the richest and most progressive of
Christian countries; how large bodies of them
live in habitations in which a rich man would
76
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
not ask his dog to dwell; how the great major-
ity have no homes from which they are not
liable on the slightest misfortune to be evicted;
how numbers have no homes at all, but must
seek what shelter chance or charity offers. I
should like to ask your Holiness to consider
how the great majority of men in such countries
have no interest whatever in what, they are
taught to call their native land, for which they
are told that on occasions it is their duty to
fight or to die. What right, for instance, have
the majority of your countrymen in the land of
their birth? Can they live in Italy outside of a
prison or a poorhouse except as they buy the
privilege from some of the exclusive owners of
Italy? Cannot an Englishman, an American,
an Arab, or a Japanese do as much? May not
what was said centuries ago by Tiberius
Gracchus be said to-day: "Men of Rome! you
are called the lords of the world, yet have no right
to a square foot of its soil! The wild beasts have
their dens, but the soldiers of Italy have only water
and air!'
What is true of Italy is true of the civilised
world-is becoming increasingly true. It is the
inevitable effect, as civilisation progresses, of
private property in land.
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
77
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 land-ownership in taxation
would be unjust and cruel to the private owner. (51.)
This, like much else that your Holiness says,
is masked in the use of the indefinite terms,
private property and private owner--a want
of precision in the use of words that has doubt-
less aided in the confusion of your own thought.
But the context leaves no doubt that by pri-
vate property you mean private property in land,
and by private owner, the private owner of land.
The contention, thus made, that private pro-
perty in land is from Nature, not from man,
has no other basis than the confounding of
ownership with possession and the ascription
to property in land of what belongs to its con-
tradictory, property in the proceeds of labour.
You do not attempt to show for it any other
basis, nor has any one else ever attempted to
do so.
That private property in the products
of labour is from Nature is clear, for Nature
gives such things to labour and to labour alone.
Of every article of this kind, we know that
it came into being as Nature's response to the
78
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
exertion of an individual man or of individual
men-given by Nature directly and exclusively
to him or to them. Thus there inheres in
such things a right of private property, which
originates from and goes back to the source.
of ownership, the maker of the thing. This
right is anterior to the State and superior to
its enactments, so that, as we hold, it is a
violation of natural right and an injustice to
the private owner for the State to tax the
processes and products of labour. They do
not belong to Cæsar. They are things that
God, of whom Nature is but an expression,
gives to those who apply for them in the way
He has appointed—by labour.
But who will dare trace the individual owner-
ship of land to any grant from the Maker of
land? What does Nature give to such owner-
ship? how does she in any way recognise it?
Will any one show from difference of form or
feature, of stature or complexion, from dissection
of their bodies or analysis of their powers and
needs, that one man was intended by Nature to
own land and another to live on it as his tenant?
That which derives its existence from man, and
passes away like him, which is indeed but the
evanescent expression of his labour, man may
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
79
hold and transfer as the exclusive property of
the individual; but how can such individual
ownership attach to land, which existed before
man was, and which continues to exist while the
generations of men come and go-the unfailing
storehouse that the Creator gives to man for
"the daily supply of his daily wants"?
Clearly, the private ownership of land is from
the State, not from Nature. Thus, not merely
can no objection be made on the score of morals
when it is proposed that the State shall abolish it
altogether, but insomuch as it is a violation of
natural right, its existence involving a gross in-
justice on the part of the State, an "impious
violation of the benevolent intention of the
Creator," it is a moral duty that the State so
abolish it.
So far from there being anything unjust in
taking the full value of land-ownership for the
use of the community, the real injustice is in
leaving it in private hands—an injustice that
amounts to robbery and murder.
And when your Holiness shall see this I have
no fear that you will listen for one moment to
the impudent plea that before the community
can take what God intended it to take, before
men who have been disinherited of their natural
80
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
rights can be restored to them, the present
owners of land shall first be compensated.
For not only will you see that the single tax
will directly and largely benefit small land-
owners, whose interests as labourers and
capitalists are much greater than their interests
as land-owners, and that though the great land-
owners or rather the propertied class in general
among whom the profits of land-ownership are
really divided through mortgages, rent charges,
etc.-would relatively lose, they too would be
absolute gainers in the increased prosperity and
improved morals. But more quickly, more
strongly, more peremptorily, than from any cal-
culation of gains or losses would your duty as a
man, your faith as a Christian, forbid you to
listen for one moment to any such paltering with
right and wrong.
Where the State takes some land for public
uses, it is only just that those whose land is taken
should be compensated, otherwise some land-
owners would be treated more harshly than
others. But where, by a measure affecting all
alike, rent is appropriated for the benefit of all,
there can be no claim to compensation. Com-
pensation in such case would be a continuance
of the same injustice in another form-the giving
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
81
to land-owners in the shape of interest of what
they before got as rent. Your Holiness knows
that justice and injustice are not thus to be
juggled with, and when you fully realise that
land is really the storehouse that God owes to
all His children, you will no more listen to any
demand for compensation for restoring it to
them than Moses would have listened to a de-
mand that Pharaoh should be compensated
before letting the children of Israel go.
Compensated for what? For giving up what
has been unjustly taken? The demand of land-
owners for compensation is not that. We do
not seek to spoil the Egyptians. We do not
ask that what has been unjustly taken from
labourers shall be restored. We are willing that
bygones should be bygones and to leave dead
wrongs to bury their dead. We propose to let
those who, by the past appropriation of land-
value, have taken the fruits of labour, retain
what they have thus got. We merely propose
that for the future such robbery of labour shall
cease-that for the future, not for the past, land-
holders shall pay to the community the rent that
to the community is justly due.
F
S2
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
III.
I HAVE said enough to show your Holiness the
injustice into which you fall in classing us, who,
in seeking virtually to abolish private property
in land, seek more fully to secure the true rights
of property, with those whom you speak of as
Socialists, who wish to make all property com-
mon. But you also do injustice to the Socialists.
There are many, it is true, who, feeling bitterly
the monstrous wrongs of the present distribution
of wealth, are animated only by a blind hatred
of the rich and a fierce desire to destroy existing
social adjustments. This class is indeed only
less dangerous than those who proclaim that
no special improvement is needed or is pos-
sible. But it is not fair to confound with them
those who, however mistakenly, propose definite
schemes of remedy.
The Socialists, as I understand them, and ast
the term has come to apply to anything like a
definite theory, and not to be vaguely and im-
properly used to include all who desire social
improvement, do not, as you imply, seek the
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
83
abolition of all private property. Those who do
this are properly called Communists. What the
Socialists seek is the assumption by the State of
capital (in which they vaguely and erroneously
include land), or, more properly speaking, of
large capitals, and State management and direc-
tion of at least the larger operations of industry.
In this way they hope to abolish interest, which
they regard as a wrong and an evil; to do away
with the gains of exchangers, speculators, con-
tractors, and middlemen, which they regard as
waste; to do away with the wage system and
secure general co-operation; and to prevent com-
petition, which they deem the fundamental cause
of the impoverishment of labour. The more
moderate of them, without going so far, go in
the same direction, and seek some remedy or
palliation of the worst forms of poverty by
Government regulation. The essential character
of Socialism is that it looks to the extension of
the functions of the State for the remedy of
social evils; that it would substitute regulation
and direction for competition, and intelligent
control by organised society for the free play of
individual desire and effort.
Though not usually classed as Socialists, both
the Trades Unionists and the Protectionists have
84
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
the same essential character. The Trades Union-
ists seek the increase of wages, the reduction of
working hours, and the general improvement in
the condition of wage-workers by organising
them into guilds or associations which shall fix
the rates at which they will sell their labour,
shall deal with employers as one body in case of
dispute, shall use on occasion their necessary
weapon, the strike, and shall accumulate funds
for such purposes and for the purpose of assist-
ing members when on a strike, or (sometimes)
when out of employment. The Protectionists
seek by governmental prohibitions or taxes on
imports to regulate the industry and control the
exchanges of each country, so, as they imagine,
to diversify home industries and prevent the
competition of people of other countries.
At the opposite extreme are the Anarchists, a
term which, though frequently applied to mere
violent destructionists, refers also to those who,
seeing the many evils of too much government,
regard government in itself as evil, and believe
that in the absence of coercive power, the
mutual interests of men would secure voluntarily
what co-operation is needed.
Differing from all these are those for whom
I would speak. Believing that the rights of
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
85
true property are sacred, we would regard for-
cible 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 con-
ceive. 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 com-
munistic 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.
86
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
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 indis-
pensable 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 which in the human
organism are discharged by the conscious in-
telligence, while the play of individual impulse
and interest performs functions akin to those
discharged in the bodily organisms by the un-
conscious 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 CONDITION OF LABOUR.
87
The philosophical Anarchists of whom I speak
are few in number, and of little practical im-
portance. 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 recognise 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 labour. 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
extentions of governing power. Thus mistaking
effects for causes, and childishly blaming the
stone for hitting it, it wastes strength in striving
8888
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
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 monarchs-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 them-
selves possess.
This superficiality and this tendency may be
seen in all the phases of Socialism.
Take, for instance, Protectionism. What sup-
port it has beyond the mere selfish desire of
sellers to compel buyers to pay them more than
their goods are worth, springs from such super-
ficial ideas as that production, not consumption,
is the end of effort, that money is more valuable
than money's worth, and to sell more profitable
than to buy; and above all, from a desire to
limit competition, springing from an unanalysing
recognition of the phenomena that necessarily
follow when men who have the need to labour
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
are deprived by monopoly of access to the natural
and indispensable element of all labour. Its
methods involve the idea that Governments can
more wisely direct the expenditure of labour
and the investment of capital than can labourers
and capitalists, and that the men who control
Governments will use this power for the general
good and not in their own interests. They tend
to multiply officials, restrict liberty, invent
crimes. They promote perjury, fraud, and cor-
ruption. And they would, were the theory
carried to its logical conclusion, destroy civilisa-
tion and reduce mankind to savagery.
Take Trades Unionism. While within narrow
lines Trades Unionism promotes the idea of the
mutuality of interests, and often helps to raise
courage and further political education, and
while it has enabled limited bodies of working-
men to improve somewhat their condition, and
gain, as it were, breathing space, yet it takes no
note of the general causes that determine the
conditions of labour, and strives for the eleva-
tion of only a small part of the
means that cannot help the rest. Aiming at the
restriction of competition-the limitation of the
right to labour, its methods are like those of
an army, which even in a righteous cause are
great body by
90
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
subversive of liberty and liable to abuse, while
its weapon, the strike, is destructive in its nature,
both to combatants and noncombatants, being a
form of passive war. To apply the principle of
Trades Unions to all industry, as some dream
of doing, would be to enthral men in a caste
system.
Or take even such moderate measures as the
limitation of working hours and of the labour of
women and children. They are superficial in
looking no further than to the eagerness of men
and women and little children to work unduly,
and in proposing forcibly to restrain overwork
while utterly ignoring its cause, the sting of
poverty that forces human beings to it. And
the methods by which these restraints must be
enforced multiply officials, interfere with per-
sonal liberty, tend to corruption, and are liable
to abuse.
As for thorough-going Socialism, which is the
more to be honoured as having the courage of
its convictions, it would carry these vices to full
expression. Jumping to conclusions without
effort to discover causes, it fails to see that op-
pression does not come from the nature of
capital, but from the wrong that robs labour of
capital by divorcing it from land, and that
THE CONDITION ÓF LABOUR.
gr
creates a fictitious capital that is really capital-
ised monopoly. It fails to see that it would be
impossible for capital to oppress labour were la-
bour free to the natural material of production;
that the wage system in itself springs from mutual
convenience, being a form of co-operation in
which one of the parties prefers a certain to a
contingent result; and that what it calls the
"iron law of wages," is not the natural law of
wages, but only the law of wages in that un-
natural condition in which men are made help-
less by being deprived of the materials for life
and work. It fails to see that what it mistakes
for the evils of competition are really the evils
of restricted competition-are due to a one-
sided competition to which men are forced when
deprived of land. While its methods, the
organisation of men into industrial armies, the
direction and control of all production and ex-
change by governmental or semi-governmental
bureaux, would, if carried to full expression
mean Egyptian despotism.
We differ from the Socialists in our diagnosis
of the evil, and we differ from them as to re-
medies. We have no fear of capital, regarding
it as the natural handmaiden of labour; we look
on interest in itself as natural and just; we
92
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
would set no limit to accumulation, nor impose
on the rich any burden that is not equally
placed on the poor; we see no evil in competi
tion, but deem unrestricted competition to be as
necessary to the health of the industrial and
social organism as the free circulation of the blood
is to the health of the bodily organism-to be
the agency whereby the fullest co-operation is
to be secured. We would simply take for the
community what belongs to the community, the
value that attaches to land by the growth of the
community; leave sacredly to the individual all
that belongs to the individual; and, treating
necessary monopolies as functions of the State,
abolish all restrictions and prohibitions save
those required for public health, safety, morals,
and convenience.
But the fundamental difference-the difference
I ask your Holiness specially to note, is in this:
Socialism in all its phases looks on the evils of
our civilisation as springing from the inadequacy
or inharmony of natural relations, which must
be artificially organised or improved. In its
idea there devolves on the State the necessity of
intelligently organising the industrial relations
of men, the construction, as it were, of a great
machine whose complicated parts shall properly
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
93
work together under the direction of human in-
telligence. This is the reason why Socialism
tends towards Atheism. Failing to see the order
and symmetry of natural law, it fails to re-
cognise God.
On the other hand, we, who call ourselves
single-tax men (a name which expresses merely
our practical propositions), see in the social and
industrial relations of men not a machine which
requires construction, but an organism which
needs only to be suffered to grow. We see in
the natural, social, and industrial laws such
harmony as we see in the adjustments of the
human body, and that as far transcends the
power of man's intelligence to order and direct
as it is beyond man's intelligence to order and
direct the vital movements of his frame. We
see in these social and industrial laws so close a
relation to the moral law as must spring from
the same Authorship, and that proves the moral
law to be the sure guide of man where his in-
telligence would wander and go astray. Thus,
to us, all that is needed to remedy the evils of
our time is to do justice and give freedom.
This is the reason why our beliefs tend towards,
nay, are indeed, the only beliefs consistent with a
firm and reverent faith in God, and with the re-
94
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
cognition of His law as the supreme law which
men must follow if they would secure prosperity
and avoid destruction. This is the reason why
to us Political Economy only serves to show the
depths of wisdom in the simple truths which
common people heard gladly from the lips of
Him of whom it was said with wonder, "Is not
this the Carpenter of Nazareth?"
And it is because that in what we propose-
the securing to all men of equal natural
opportunities for the exercise of the powers and
the removal of all legal restriction on the legi-
timate exercise of those powers-we see the
conformation of human law to the moral law,
that we hold with confidence not merely that
this is the sufficient remedy for all the evils you
so strikingly portray, but that it is the only
possible remedy.
Nor is there any other. The organisation of
man is such, his relations to the world in which
he is placed are such-that is to say, the im-
mutable laws of God are such-that it is beyond
the power of human ingenuity to devise any
way by which the evils born of the injustice that
robs men of their birthright can be removed
otherwise than by doing justice, by opening to
all the bounty that God has provided for all.
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
95
Since man can live only on land and from
land, since land is the reservoir of matter and
force from which man's body itself is taken, and
on which he must draw for all that he can pro-
duce, does it not irresistibly follow that to give
the land in ownership to some men and to deny
to others all right to it is to divide mankind in-
to the rich and the poor, the privileged and the
helpless? Does it not follow that those who
have no rights to the use of land can only live
by selling their power to labour to those who
own the land? Does it not follow that what
the Socialists call "the iron law of wages," what
the Political Economists term "the tendency of
wages to a minimum," must take from the land-
less masses—the mere labourers, who of them-
selve have no power to use their labour-all the
benefits of any possible advance or improvement
that does not alter this unjust division of land?
For having no power to employ themselves, they
must, either as labour-sellers or land-renters, com-
pete with one another for permission to labour.
This competition with one another of men shut out
from God's inexhaustible storehouse has no limit
but starvation, and must ultimately force wages to
their lowest point, the point at which life can just
be maintained and reproduction carried on.
96
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
This is not to say that all wages must fall to
this point, but that the wages of that necessarily
largest stratum of labourers who have only
ordinary knowledge, skill, and aptitude, must so
fall. The wages of special classes, who are
fenced off from the pressure of competition by
peculiar knowledge, skill, or causes, may remain
above that ordinary level. Thus where the
ability to read and write is rare, its possession
enables a man to obtain higher wages than the
ordinary labourer. But as the diffusion of
education makes the ability to read and write
general, this advantage is lost. So when a
vocation requires special training or skill, or is
made difficult of access by artificial restrictions,
the checking of competition tends to keep wages
in it at a higher level. But as the progress of
invention dispenses with peculiar skill, or arti-
ficial restrictions are broken down, these higher
wages sink to the ordinary level. And so, it is
only so long as they are special that such qualities
as industry, prudence, and thrift, can enable the
ordinary labourer to maintain a condition above
that which gives a mere living. Where they
become general, the law of competition must
reduce the earnings or savings of such qualities
to the general level-which, land being mono-
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
97
polised and labour helpless, can be only that at
which the next lowest point is the cessation of life.
Or, to state the same thing in another way:
Land being necessary to life and labour, its
owners will be able, in return for permission to
use it, to obtain from mere labourers all that
labour can produce save enough to enable such
of them to maintain life as are wanted by the
land-owners and their dependents.
Thus, where private property in land has
divided society into a land-owning class and a
landless class, there is no possible invention or
improvement, whether it be industrial, social, or
moral, which, so long as it does not affect the
ownership of land, can prevent poverty or relieve
the general conditions of mere labourers. For
whether the effect of any invention or improve-
ment be to increase what labour can produce,
or to decrease what is required to support the
labourer, it can, so soon as it becomes general,
result only in increasing the income of the
owners of land, without at all benefiting the
mere labourers. In no event can those possessed
of the mere ordinary power to labour, a power
utterly useless without the means necessary to
labour, keep more of their earnings than enough
to enable them to live.
G
98
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
How true this is we may see in the facts of to-
day. In our own time invention and discovery
have enormously increased the productive power
of labour, and at the same time greatly reduced
the cost of many things necessary to the support
of the labourer. Have these improvements any-
where raised the earnings of the mere labourer?
Have not their benefits mainly gone to the
owners of land, enormously increased land-
values?
I say mainly, for some part of the benefit has
gone in the cost of monstrous standing armies
and warlike preparations, to the payment of
interest on great public debts, and, largely dis-
guised as interest on fictitious capital, to the
owners of monopolies other than that of land.
But improvements that would do away with
these wastes would not benefit labour; they
would simply increase the profits of land-owners.
Were standing armies and all their incidents
abolished, were all monopolies other than that of
land done away with, were Governments to be-
come models of economy, were the profits of
speculators, of middlemen, of all sorts of ex-
changers saved, were every one to become so
strictly honest that no policemen, no courts, no
prisons, no precautions against dishonesty would
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
99
be needed
the result would not differ from that
which has followed the increase of productive
power.
Nay, would not these very blessings bring
starvation to many of those who now manage
to live? Is it not true that if there were
proposed to-day, what all Christian men ought
to pray for, the complete disbandment of all
the armies of Europe, that the greatest fears
would be aroused for the consequences of
throwing on the labour-market so many un-
employed labourers?
The explanation of this and of similar para-
doxes that in our time perplex on every side
may be easily seen. The effect of all inven-
tions and improvements that increase productive
power, that save waste and economise effort, is
to lessen the labour required for a given result,
and thus to save labour, so that we speak of
them as labour-saving inventions or improve-
ments. Now, in a natural state of society,
where the rights of all to the use of the earth
are acknowledged, labour-saving improvements
might go to the very utmost that can be imagined
without lessening the demand for men, since
in such natural conditions the demand for men
lies in their own enjoyment of life and the
DorM
100
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
strong instincts that the Creator has implanted
in the human breast. But in that unnatural
state of society where the masses of men are
disinherited of all but the power to labour
when opportunity to labour is given them by
others, then the demand for them becomes
simply the demand for their services by those
who hold this opportunity, and man himself
becomes a commodity. Hence, although the
natural effect of labour-saving improvement is to
increase wages, yet in the unnatural condition
which private ownership of the land begets, the
effect, even of such moral improvements as the
disbandment of armies and the saving of the
labour that vice entails, is, by lessening the
commercial demand, to lower wages and reduce
mere labourers to starvation or pauperism. If
labour-saving inventions and improvements could
be carried to the very abolition of the necessity
for labour-what would be the result? Would
it not be that land-owners could then get all
the wealth that the land was capable of produc-
ing, and would have no need at all for labour-
ers, who must then either starve or live as
pensioners on the bounty of the land-owners?
Thus, so long as private property in land
continues-so long as some men are treated,
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
ΙΟΙ
as owners of the earth and other men live on
it only by their sufferance-human wisdom
can devise no means by which the evils of
our present condition may be avoided.
Nor yet could the wisdom of God!
By the light of that right reason of which
St. Thomas speaks, we may see that even He,
the Almighty, so long as
so long as His laws remain
what they are, could do nothing to prevent
poverty and starvation while property in land
continues.
How could He? Should He infuse new vigour
into the sunlight, new virtue into the air, new
fertility into the soil, would not all this new
bounty go to the owners of the land, and work
not benefit, but rather injury, to mere labourers?
Should He open the minds of men to the possi-
bilities of new substances, new adjustments, new
powers, would the benefit do any more to relieve
poverty than have steam, electricity, and all the
numberless discoveries and inventions of our
time? Or, if He were to send down from the
heavens above or cause to gush up from the
subterranean depths, food, clothing, all the things
that satisfy man's material desires, to whom
under our laws would all this belong? So far
from benefiting man, would not this increase
102
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
:
and extension of His bounty prove but a curse,
permitting the privileged class more riotously to
roll in wealth, and bringing the disinherited
class to more wide-spread starvation or pauper-
ism?
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
103
IV.
BELIEVING that the social question is at bottom
a religious question, we deem it of happy augury
to the world that in your Encyclical the most
influential of all religious teachers has directed
attention to the condition of labour.
But while we appreciate the many wholesome
truths you utter, while we feel, as all must feel,
that you are animated by a desire to help the
suffering and oppressed, and to put an end to
any idea that the Church is divorced from the
aspiration for liberty and progress, yet it is pain-
fully obvious to us that one fatal assumption hides
from you the cause of the evils you see, and
makes it impossible for you to propose any
adequate remedy. This assumption is, that pri-
vate property in land is of the same nature and
has the same sanctions as private property in
things produced by labour. In spite of its un-
deniable truths and its benevolent spirit, your
Encyclical shows you to be involved in such
difficulties as a physician called to examine one
suffering from disease of the stomach would meet
104
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
should he begin with a refusal to consider the
stomach.
Prevented by this assumption from seeing the
true cause, the only causes you find it possible
to assign for the growth of misery and wretched-
ness are the destruction of working-men's guilds
in the last century, the repudiation in public
institutions and laws of the ancient religion,
rapacious usury, the custom of working by con-
tract, and the concentration of trade.
Such diagnosis is manifestly inadequate to
account for evils that are alike felt in Catholic
countries, in Protestant countries, in countries
that adhere to the Greek communion, and in
countries where no religion is professed by the
State; that are alike felt in old countries and in
new countries; where industry is simple and
where it is most elaborate; and amid all
varieties of industrial customs and relations.
But the real cause will be clear if you will
consider that since labour must find its work-
shop and reservoir in land, the labour question
is but another name for the land question, and
will re-examine your assumption that private
property in land is necessary and right.
See how fully adequate is the cause I have
pointed out. The most important of all the
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
105
material relations of man is his relation to the
planet he inhabits, and hence, the "impious re-
sistance to the benevolent intentions of his
Creator," which, as Bishop Nulty says, is in-
volved in private property in land, must pro-
duce evils wherever it exists. But by virtue
of the law, "unto whom much is given, from
him much is required," the very progress of
civilisation makes the evils produced by private
property in land more wide-spread and intense.
What is producing throughout the civilised
world that condition of things you rightly de-
scribe as intolerable, is not this and that local
error or minor mistake. It is nothing less than
the progress of civilisation itself, nothing less than
the intellectual advance and the material growth
in which our century has been so pre-eminent,
acting in a state of society based on private
property in land; nothing less than the new
gifts that in our time God has been showering
on man, but which are being turned into
scourges by man's "impious resistance to the
benevolent intentions of his Creator."
The discoveries of science, the gains of in-
vention have given to us in this wonderful cen-
tury more than has been given to men in any
time before. But with the benefit comes the
105
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
obligation. In a civilisation beginning to pulse
with steam and electricity, where the sun paints
pictures and the phonograph stores speech, it
will not do to be merely as just as were our
fathers. Intellectual advance and material ad-
vance require corresponding moral advance.
Knowledge and power are neither good nor
evil. They are not ends but means-evolving
forces that if not controlled in orderly relations
must take disorderly and destructive forms.
The deepening pain, the increasing perplexity,
the growing discontent for which, as you truly
say, some remedy must be found and quickly found,
mean nothing less than that forces of destruc-
tion, swifter and more terrible than those that
have shattered every preceding civilisation, are
already menacing ours-that if it does not
quickly rise to a higher moral level; if it does
not become in deed as in word a Christian civili-
sation, on the wall of its splendour must flame
the doom of Babylon: "Thou art weighed in
the balance and found wanting!"
One false assumption prevents you from seeing
this-the real cause and true significance of the
facts that have prompted your Encyclical. And
it fatally ſetters you when you seek a remedy.
You state that you approach the subject with
the condiTION OF LABOUR.
107
confidence, yet in all that greater part of the
Encyclical (19-66) devoted to the remedy, while
there is an abundance of moral reflections and
injunctions, excellent in themselves, but dead and
meaningless as you apply them, the only definite
practical proposals for the improvement of the
conditions of labour are:
1. That the State should step in to prevent
over-work, to restrict the employment of women
and children, to secure in workshops conditions
not unfavourable to health and morals, and, at
least where there is danger of insufficient wages
provoking strikes, to regulate wages (39, 40).
2. That it should encourage the acquisition
of property (in land) by working-men (50, 51).
3. That working-men's associations should be
formed (52-67).
These remedies, so far as they go, are socialis-
tic, and though the Encyclical is not without re-
cognition of the individual character of man and
of the priority of the individual and the family
to the State, yet the whole tendency and spirit of
its remedial suggestions lean unmistakably to
108
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
Socialism-extremely moderate Socialism it is
true; Socialism hampered and emasculated by
a supreme respect for private possessions; yet
Socialism still. But, although you frequently use
the ambiguous term "private property," when
the context shows that you have in mind private
property in land, the one thing clear on the sur-
face and becoming clearer still with examination
is that you insist that whatever else may be done,
the private ownership of land shall be left un-
touched!
I have already referred generally to the defects.
that attach to all socialistic remedies for the evil
conditions of labour, but respect for your
Holiness dictates that I should speak specifically,
even though briefly, of the remedies made or
suggested by you.
Of these the widest and strongest are that the
State should restrict the hours of labour, the
employment of women and children, the un-
sanitary conditions of workshops, etc. Yet how
little may in this way be accomplished.
A strong, absolute rule might hope by such
regulations to alleviate the conditions of chattel
slaves. But the tendency of our times is towards
democracy, and democratic States are necessarily
weaker in paternalism, while in the industrial
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
109
slavery, growing out of private ownership of
land, that prevails in Christendom to-day, it is
not the master who forces the slave to labour, but
the slave who urges the master to let him labour.
Thus the greatest difficulty in enforcing such
regulations comes from those whom they are in-
tended to benefit. It is not, for instance, the
masters who make it difficult to enforce re-
strictions on child labour in factories, but the
mothers who, prompted by poverty, misrepresent
the of their children even to the masters, and
ages
teach the children to misrepresent.
But while in large factories and mines regula-
tions 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 labourer works
for himself or for small employers?
All such remedies are of the nature of the
remedy for overcrowding that is generally pre-
scribed 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
ΙΙΟ
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
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 loco-
motive by holding its wheels instead of shutting
off steam; like attempting to cure small-pox 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 labourers will work in dangerous and
unsanitary conditions. These things, like over-
crowding, come from the sting of poverty. And
so long as the poverty of which they are ex-
pression is left untouched, restriction such as you
endorse 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
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
III
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 labour can obtain
access to land, ranging from the full earnings of
labour, where land is free, to the least on which
labourers can live and reproduce, where land is
fully monopolised. Thus, where it has been com-
paratively easy for labourers to get land, as in
the United States and in Australasia, wages have
been higher than in Europe, and it has been im-
possible to get European labourers to work there
for wages that they would gladly accept at home;
while as monopolisation goes on under the in-
fluence 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
Parliaments 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
II2
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
labourers by grants in aid of wages. But the
only result was to lower commensurately what
wages employers paid. The State could only
maintain wages above the tendency of the
market (for, as I have shown, labour deprived of
land becomes a commodity), by offering employ-
ment to all who wish it; or by lending its
sanction to strikes and supporting them with its
funds. Thus it is that the thorough-going Social-
ists 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 land-owners in favour of small ones,
establishing what is known as peasant proprietors.
Supposing that this can be done even to a con-
siderable 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 labourers
of the agricultural districts, the workmen of the
towns, the proletarians of the cities?
Is it not
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
113
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 labourer is
even worse than it is in Great Britain, where
large ownerships obtain? And if the State at-
tempts to buy up land for peasant proprietors,
will not the effect be, what is seen to-day in Ire-
land, to increase the market-value of land, and
thus make it more difficult for those not so
favoured, 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 Com-
munism that uses the coercive power of the State
to take rightful property by force from those
H
"1
114
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
who have and 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 co-exist
with the treatment of land as private property
where civilisation 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-conquer-
ing 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 land-owners into a nation of tenants.
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
115
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
in our civilisation working people 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 land-ownership for the community.
As to working-men's associations, what your
Holiness seems to contemplate is the formation
and encouragement of societies akin to the
Catholic sodalities, and to the friendly and
beneficial societies, like the Oddfellows which
have had a large extension in English-speaking
countries. Such associations may promote fra-
ternity, extend social intercourse and provide
assurance in case of sickness or death, but if
they go no further they are powerless to affect
wages even among their members. As to Trades
Unions proper, it is hard to define your position,
which is, perhaps, best stated as one of warm
116
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
approbation, provided that they do not go too
far. For while you object to strikes, while you
reprehend societies that "do their best to get
into their hands the whole field of labour and to
force working-men either to join them or to
starve," while you discountenance the coercion
of employers, and seem to think that arbitration
might take the place of strikes, yet you use ex-
pressions and assert principles that are all that the
Trade Unionist would ask, not merely to justify
the strike and the boycott, but even the use of
violence where only violence would suffice. For
you speak of the insufficient wages of workmen
as due to the greed of rich employers; you
assume the moral right of the workman to ob-
tain employment from others at wages greater
than those others are willing freely to give; and
you deny the right of any one to work for such
wages as he pleases, in such a way as to lead
Mr. Stead, in so widely read a journal as the
Reviews of Reviews, to unequivocally declare that
you regard "blacklegging," i.e., the working
for less than Union wages, as a crime.
To men conscious of bitter injustice, to men
steeped in poverty, yet mocked by flaunting
wealth, such words mean more than I can think
you realise!
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
117
thinking of
When fire shall be cool and ice be warm,
when armies shall throw away lead and iron, to
try conclusions by the pelting of rose leaves,
such labour associations as you are
may be possible. But not till then. For labour
associations can do nothing to raise wages but
by force. It may be force applied passively, or
force applied actively, or force held in reserve,
but it must be force. They must coerce or hold
the power to coerce employers, they must coerce
those among their own members disposed to
straggle, they must do their best to get into their
hands the whole field of labour they seek to
occupy and to force other
join them or to starve.
Trades Unions bent on
suasion alone, are like those who would tell you
of tigers who live on oranges.
working-men either to
Those who tell
Those who tell you of
raising wages by moral
The condition of the masses to-day is that of
men pressed together in a hall where ingress is
open and more are constantly coming, but where
the doors for egress are closed. If forbidden
to relieve the general pressure by throwing open
those doors, whose bars and bolts are private
property in land, they can only mitigate the
pressure on themselves by forcing back others,
and the weakest must be driven to the wall.
118
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
This is the way of Labour Unions and Trade
Guilds. Even those amiable societies that you
recommend would, in their efforts to find em-
ployment for their own members, necessarily
displace others.
For even the philanthropy which, recognising
the evil of trying to help labour by alms, seeks
to help men to help themselves by finding them
work, becomes aggressive in the blind and bitter
struggle that private property in land entails,
and in helping one set of men injures others.
Thus to minimise the bitter complaints of taking
work from others and lessening the wages of
others in providing their own beneficiaries with
work and wages, benevolent societies are forced
to devices akin to the digging of holes and filling
them up again. Our American societies find
this difficulty; General Booth encounters it in
England; and the Catholic societies which your
Holiness recommends must find it, when they
are formed.
Your Holiness knows of, and I am sure hon-
ours, the princely generosity of Baron Hirsch
towards his suffering co-religionists. But, as I
write, the New York newspapers contain ac-
counts of an immense meeting held in Cooper
Union, in this city, on the evening of Friday,
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
119
September 4th, in which a number of Hebrew
Trades Unions protested in the strongest manner
against the loss of work and reduction of wages
that is being effected by Baron Hirsch's genero-
sity in bringing their own countrymen here and
teaching them to work. The resolution unani-
mously adopted at this great meeting thus con-
cludes:
"We now demand of Baron Hirsch himself
that he release us from his 'charity' and take
back the millions, which, instead of a blessing,
have proved a curse and a source of misery."
Nor does this show that the members of these
Hebrew Labour Unions-who are themselves
immigrants of the same class as those Baron
Hirsch is striving to help, for in the next gen-
eration they lose with us their distinctiveness-
are a whit less generous than other men.
Labour associations of the nature of Trade
Guilds or Unions are necessarily selfish; by the
law of their being they must fight for their own
hand, regardless of who is hurt; they ignore
and must ignore the teaching of Christ that we
should do to others as we would have them do
to us, which a true political economy shows is
120
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
the only way to the full emancipation of the
masses. They must do their best to starve
workmen who do not join them, they must by
all means in their power force back the "black-
leg" as the soldier in battle must shoot down
his mother's son if in the opposing ranks. And
who is the blackleg? A fellow-creature seek-
ing work—a fellow-creature in all probability
more pressed and starved than those who so
bitterly denounce him, and often with the
hungry, pleading faces of wife and child behind
him.
And, in so far as they succeed, what is it that
Trade Guilds and Unions do but to impose more
restrictions on natural rights; to create "trusts
in labour; to add to privileged classes other
somewhat privileged classes, and to press the
weaker closer to the wall?
I speak without prejudice against Trades
Unions, of which I was for years an active mem-
ber. And in pointing out to your Holiness that
their principle is selfish and incapable of large
and permanent benefits, and that their methods
violate natural rights and work hardship and
injustice, I am only saying to you what, both in
my books and by word of mouth, I have said
over and over again to them. Nor is what I
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
121
say capable of dispute. Intelligent Trades
Unionists know it, and the less intelligent
vaguely feel it. And even those of the classes
of wealth and leisure, who, as if to head off the
demand for natural rights, are preaching Trades
Unionism to working-men, must needs admit it.
Your Holiness will remember the great
London dock strike of two years ago, which,
with that of other influential men, received the
moral support of that Prince of the Church
whom we of the English speech hold higher and
dearer than any prelate has been held by us
since the blood of Thomas A'Becket stained the
Canterbury altar.
In a volume called "The Story of the
Dockers' Strike," written by Messrs. H. Lewellyn
Smith and Vaughan Nash, with an introduction
by Sydney Buxton, M.P., which advocates
Trades Unionism as the solution of the labour
question, and of which a large number were
sent to Australia as a sort of official recognition
of the generous aid received from there by the
strikers, I find in the summing up, on pages
164-5, the following:
"If the settlement lasts, work at the docks
will be more regular, better paid, and carried
122
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
on under better conditions than ever before.
All this will be an unqualified gain to those who
get the benefit from it. But another result will
undoubtedly be to contract the field of employ-
ment and lessen the number of those for whom
work can be found. The lower class casual
will, in the end, find his position more pre-
carious than ever before, in proportion to the
increased regularity of work which the 'fitter'
of the labourers will secure. The effect of the
organisation of dock labour, as of all classes of
labour, will be to squeeze out the residuum. The
loafer, the cadger, the failure in the industrial
race-the members of Class B' of Mr. Charles
Booth's hierarchy of social classes-will be no
gainers by the change, but will rather find an-
other door closed against them, and this in many
cases the last door to employment."
I am far from wishing that your Holiness
should join in that pharisaical denunciation of
Trades Unions common among those who, while
quick to point out the injustice of Trades Unions
in denying to others the equal right to work, are
themselves supporters of that more primary in-
justice that denies the equal right to the stand-
ing place and natural material necessary to
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
work. What I wish to point out is that Trades
Unionism, while it may be a partial paliative, is
not a remedy, that it has not that moral charac-
ter which could alone justify one in the position
of your Holiness in urging it as good in itself.
Yet, so long as you insist on private property in
land, what better can you do?
124
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
V.
In the beginning of the Encyclical you de-
clare that the responsibility of the apostolical
office urges your Holiness to treat the question
of the condition of labour "expressly and at
length in order that there may be no mistake as
to the principles which truth and justice dictate
for its settlement." But, blinded by one false
assumption, you do not see even fundamentals.
You assume that the labour question is a
question between wage-workers and their em-
ployers. But working for wages is not the
primary or exclusive occupation of labour.
Primarily, men work for themselves, without the
intervention of an employer. And the primary
source of wages is in the earnings of labour, the
man who works for himself and consumes his
own products receiving his wages in the fruits of
his labour. Are not fishermen, boatmen, cab
drivers, pedlars, working farmers-all, in short,
of the many workers who get their wages di-
rectly by the sale of their services or products
without the medium of an employer, as much
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
125
labourers 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 labourers
who work for themselves are the first to be con-
sidered, 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 fail-
ure? 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 labourers naturally belong to the poor.
It is true, as you say, that there are natural
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 natu-
ral differences in powers and aptitudes are
certainly not greater than are natural differ-
126
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
ences in stature. But while it is only by select-
ing giants and dwarfs that we can find men
twice as tall as others, yet in the difference be-
tween rich and poor that exists to-day we find
some men richer than other men by the thou-
sandfold and the millionfold.
Nowhere do these differences between wealth
and poverty coincide with differences in indi-
vidual powers and aptitudes. The real differ-
ence between rich and poor is the difference
between those who hold the toll gates and those
who pay toll; between tribute receivers and
tribute yielders.
In what way does Nature justify such a differ-
ence? In the numberless varieties of animated
nature we find some species that are evidently
intended to live on other species. But their
relations are always marked by unmistakable
differences in size, shape, or organs. To man has
been given dominion over all the other living
things that tenant the earth. But is not this
mastery indicated even in externals, so that no
one can fail on sight to distinguish between a
man and one of the inferior animals? Our
American apologist for slavery used to contend
that the black skin and woolly hair of the negro
indicated the intent of Nature that the black
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR,
127
should serve the white; but the difference that
you assume to be natural is between men of the
same race. What difference does Nature show
between such men as would indicate her intent
that one should live idly, yet be rich, and the
other should work hard, yet be poor? If I
could bring you from the United States a man
who has 200,000,000 dollars, and one who is
glad to work for a few dollars a week, and
place them side by side in your antechamber,
would you—even were you to call in the most
skilled anatomist-be able to tell which was
which? Is it not clear that God in no way
countenances or condones the division of rich
and poor that exists to-day, or in any way per-
mits it, except as having given them free will He
permits men to choose either good or evil, and
to avoid heaven if they prefer hell? For is it
not clear that the division of men into the
classes rich and poor has invariably its origin in
force and fraud; invariably involves violation of
the moral law, and is really a division into those
who get the profits of robbery and those who
are robbed; those who hold in exclusive pos-
session what God made for all, and those who
are deprived of His bounty? Did not Christ
in all His utterances and parables show that the
128
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
gross difference between rich and poor is
opposed to God's law? Would He have con-
demned the rich so strongly as He did if the
class distinction between rich and poor did not
involve injustice; was not opposed to God's
intent?
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 labour." 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 labour.
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 CONDITION OF LABOUR.
i29
the sustenance, secured by labour, that one gen-
eration owes to its immediate successors. Arrived
at maturity, He earned His own subsistence by
that common labour in which the majority of
men must and do earn it. Then passing to a
higher to the very highest-sphere of labour,
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
land-owners or other monopolists who live on
the labour of others, but to common labouring
And when He called them to a higher
sphere of labour 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 labour, saying to them that the
“labourer is worthy of his hire," thus showing,
what we hold, that all labour does not consist
in what is called manual labour, but that who-
ever helps to add to the material, intellectual,
moral, or spiritual fulness of life is also a
labourer.¹
men.
1 Nor should it be forgotten that the investigator, the
Dor M
I
130
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
In assuming that labourers, even ordinary
manual labourers, are naturally poor, you ignore
the fact that labour 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
labour-saving appliances of our time, it should
be possible for all to earn much more.
And so,
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 fulness-he is, in the large meaning of
words, a "producer," a "working man," a "labourer," 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
honour 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.
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
131
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 mis-
fortune, imply recklessness or laziness.
ex-
The sympathy of your Holiness seems
clusively directed to the poor, the workers.
Ought this to be so? Are not the rich, the
idlers, to be pitied also? By the word of the
Gospel it is the rich rather than the poor who
call for pity, for the presumption is that they
will share the fate of Dives. And to any one
who believes in a future life the condition of him
who wakes to find his cherished millions left be-
hind must seem pitiful. But even in this life,
how really pitiable are the rich. The evil is not
in wealth in itself—in its command over material
things; it is in the possession of wealth while
others are steeped in poverty; in being raised
above touch with the life of humanity, from its
work and its struggles, its hopes and its fears,
and above all, from the love that sweetens life,
and the kindly sympathies and generous acts that
strengthen faith in man and trust in God. Con-
sider how the rich see the meaner side of human
nature; how they are surrounded by flatterers
132
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
}
and sycophants; how they find ready instruments
not only to gratify vicious impulses, but to
prompt and stimulate them; how they must
constantly be on guard lest they be swindled ;
how often they must suspect an ulterior motive
behind kindly deed or friendly word; how, if
they try to be generous, they are beset by shame-
less beggars and scheming impostors; how often
the family affections are chilled for them, and
their deaths anticipated with the ill-concealed
joy of expectant possession. The worst evil of
poverty is not in the want of material things, but
in the stunting and distortion of the higher
qualities. So, though in another way, the pos-
session of unearned wealth likewise stunts and
distorts what is noblest in man.
God's commands cannot be evaded with im-
punity. If it be God's command that men shall
earn their bread by labour, the idle rich must
suffer. And they do. See the utter vacancy of
the lives of those who live for pleasure, see the
loathsome vices bred in a class who, surrounded
by poverty, are sated with wealth. See that
terrible punishment of ennui, of which the poor
know so little that they cannot understand it;
see the pessimism that grows among the wealthy
classes that shuts out God, that despises men,
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
133
that deems existence in itself an evil, and, fearing
death, yet longs for annihilation.
When Christ told the rich young man who
sought Him to sell all he had and to give it to
the poor, He was not thinking of the poor, but
of the young man.
And I doubt not that
among the rich, and especially among the self-
made rich, there are many who, at times at least,
feel keenly the folly of their riches and fear for
the dangers and temptations to which these ex-
pose their children. But the strength of long
habit, the promptings of pride, the excitement
of making and holding what has become for
them the counters in a game of cards, the family
expectations that have assumed the character of
rights, and the real difficulty they find in mak-
ing any good use of their wealth, bind them to
their burden like a weary donkey to his pack,
till they stumble on the precipice that bounds
this life.
Men who are sure of getting food when they
shall need it eat only what appetite dictates.
But with the sparse tribes who exist on the
verge of the habitable globe life is either a
famine or a feast. Enduring hunger for days,
the fear of it prompts them to gorge like ana-
condas when successful in their quest of game.
134
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
And so, what gives wealth its curse is what
drives men to seek it; what makes it so envied
and admired-the fear of want. As the unduly
rich are the corollary of the unduly poor, so is
the soul-destroying quality of riches but the
reflex of the want that embrutes and degrades.
The real evil lies in the injustice from which
unnatural possession and unnatural deprivation
both spring.
But this injustice can hardly be blamed on
individuals or classes. The existence of private
property in land is a great social wrong from
which society at large suffers and of which the
very rich and the very poor are alike victims,
though at the opposite extremes. Seeing this,
it seems to us like a violation of Christian
charity to speak of the rich as though they in-
dividually were responsible for the sufferings of
the poor. Yet, while you do this, you insist
that the cause of monstrous wealth and degrad-
ing poverty shall not be touched. Here is a
man with a disfiguring and dangerous excres-
cence. One physician would kindly, gently, but
firmly remove it. Another insists that it shall
not be removed, but at the same time holds up
the poor victim to hatred and ridicule. Which
is right?
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
135
In seeking to restore all men to their equal
and natural rights, we do not seek the benefit of
any class, but of all. For we both see by fact
and know by faith that injustice can profit no
one and that justice must benefit all.
Nor do we seek any "futile and ridiculous
equality." We recognise, with you, that there
must always be differences and inequalities. In
so far as these are in conformity with the moral
law, in so far as they do not violate the com-
mand, "Thou shalt not steal," we are content.
We do not seek to better God's work; we seek
only to do His will. The equality we would
bring about is not the equality of fortune, but
the equality of natural opportunity; the equality
that reason and religion alike proclaim-the
equality in usufruct of all His children to the
bounty of "Our Father who art in Heaven."
And in taking for the uses of society what
we clearly see is the great fund intended for
society in the divine order, we would not levy
the slightest tax on the possessors of wealth, no
matter how rich they might be. Not only do
we deem such taxes a violation of the right of
property, but we see that by virtue of beautiful
adaptations in the economic laws of the Creator,
it is impossible for any one honestly to acquire
136
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
wealth, without at the same time adding to the
wealth of the world.
To persist in a wrong, to refuse to undo it, is
always to become involved in other wrongs.
Those who defend private property in land, and
thereby deny the first and most important of all
human rights, the equal right to the material
substratum of life, are compelled to one of two
courses. Either they must, as do those whose
gospel is "Devil take the hindermost," deny the
equal right to life, and by some theory like that
to which the English clergyman, Malthus, has
given his name, assert that Nature (they do not
venture to say God) brings into the world more
men than there is provision for. Or they must,
as do the Socialists, assert as rights what in them-
selves are wrongs. Your Holiness in the Encycli-
cal gives an example of this. Denying the equality
of right to the material basis of life, and yet con-
scious that there is a right to live, you assert the
right of labourers to employment and their right
to receive from their employers a certain in-
definite wage. No such rights exist. No one has
a right to demand employment of another, or to
demand higher wages than the other is willing
to give, or in any way to put pressure on an-
other to make him raise such wages against his
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
137
will. There can be no better moral justification
for such demands on employers by working-men
than there would be for employers demanding
that working-men shall be compelled to work
for them when they do not want to, and to
accept wages lower than they are willing to
take. Any seeming justification springs from a
prior wrong, the denial to working-men of their
natural rights, and can in the last analysis only
rest on that supreme dictate of self-preservation
that under extraordinary circumstances made
pardonable what in itself is theft, or sacrilege, or
even murder.
A fugitive slave with the bloodhounds of his
pursuers baying at his heels would in true
Christian morals be held blameless if he seized
the first horse he came across, even though to
take it he had to knock down the rider. But
this is not to justify horse-stealing as an ordinary
means of travelling.
When His disciples were hungry Christ per-
mitted them to pluck corn on the Sabbath day.
But He never denied the sanctity of the Sabbath
by asserting that it was under ordinary cir
cumstances a proper time to gather corn.
He justified David, who when pressed by
hunger committed what ordinarily would be
138
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
sacrilege, by taking from the temple the loaves
of proposition. But in this He was far from
saying that the robbing of temples was a proper
way of getting a living.
In the Encyclical, however, you commend the
application to the ordinary relations of life,
under normal conditions, of principles that in
ethics are only to be tolerated under extraordin-
ary conditions. You are driven to this assertion
of false rights by your denial of true rights.
The natural right which each man has, is not
that of demanding employment or wages from
another man; but that of employing himself-
that of applying by his own labour to the in-
exhaustible storehouse which the Creator has
in the land provided for all men. Were that
storehouse open, as by the single tax we would
open it, the natural demand for labour would
keep pace with the supply, the man who sold
labour and the man who bought it would become
free exchangers for mutual advantage, and all
cause for dispute between workman and em-
ployer would be gone. For then, all being free
to employ themselves, the mere opportunity to
labour would cease to seem a boon; and since
no one would work for another for less, all things
considered, than he could earn by working for
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
139
himself, wages would necessarily rise to their
full value, and the relations of workman and
employer be regulated by mutual interest and
convenience.
This is the only way in which they can be
satisfactorily regulated.
Your Holiness seems to assume that there is
some just rate of wages that employers ought to
be willing to pay and that labourers should be
content to receive, and to imagine that if this
were secured there would be an end of strife.
This rate you evidently think of as that which
will give working-men a frugal living, and per-
haps enable them by hard work and strict
economy to lay by a little something.
But how can a just rate of wages be fixed
without the "higgling of the market," any more
than the just price of corn, or pigs, or ships, or
paintings can be so fixed? And would not
arbitrary regulation in the one case as in the
other check that interplay that most effectively
promotes the economical adjustment of produc-
tive forces? Why should buyers of labour, any
more than buyers of commodities, be called on
to pay higher prices than in a free market they
are compelled to pay? Why should the sellers
of labour be content with anything less than in
140
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
a free market they can obtain? Why should
working-men be content with frugal fare when
the world is so rich? Why should they be
satisfied with a lifetime of toil and stinting,
when the world is so beautiful? Why should
not they also desire to gratify the higher instincts,
the finer tastes? Why should they be forever
content to travel in the steerage when others
find the cabin more enjoyable ?
Nor will they. The ferment of our time does
not arise merely from the fact that working-men
find it harder to live on the same scale of com-
fort. It is also and perhaps still more largely
due to the increase of their desires with an im-
proved scale of comfort. This increase of
desire must continue. For working-men are
men. And man is the unsatisfied animal.
He is not an ox, of whom it may be said, so
much grass, so much grain, so much water, and
a little salt, and he will be content. On the
contrary, the more he gets the more he craves.
When he has enough food, then he wants better
food. When he gets a shelter, then he wants a
more commodious and tasty one. When his
animal needs are satisfied, then mental and
spiritual desires arise.
This restless discontent is of the nature of
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
141
man-of that nobler nature that raises him
above the animals by so immeasurable a gulf,
and shows him to be indeed created in the like-
ness of God. It is not to be quarrelled with, for
it is the motor of all progress. It is this that
has raised St. Peter's dome and on dull, dead
canvas made the angelic face of the Madonna
to glow; it is this that has weighed suns and
analysed stars, and opened page after page of
the wonderful works of creative intelligence; it
is this that has narrowed the Atlantic to an
ocean ferry and trained the lightning to carry
our messages to the remotest lands: it is this
that is opening to us possibilities beside which
all that our modern civilisation has as yet ac-
complished seem small. Nor can it be repressed
save by degrading and imbruting men; by re-
ducing Europe to Asia.
Hence, short of what wages may be earned
when all restrictions on labour are removed and
access to natural opportunities on equal terms
secured to all, it is impossible to fix any rate of
wages that will be deemed just, or any rate of
wages that can prevent working-men striving to
get more. So far from it making working-men
more contented to improve their condition a little,
it is certain to make them more discontented.
142
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
Nor are you asking justice when you ask
employers to pay their working-men more than
they are compelled to pay-more than they
could get others to do the work for. You are
asking charity. For the surplus that the rich
employer thus gives is not in reality wages,
it is essentially alms.
In speaking of the practical measures for the
improvement of the condition of labour which
your Holiness suggests, I have not mentioned
what you place much stress upon-charity.
But there is nothing practical in such recom-
mendations as a cure for poverty, nor will any
one so consider them. If it were possible for
the giving of alms to abolish poverty, there would
be no poverty in Christendom.
Charity is indeed a noble and beautiful virtue,
grateful to man and approved by God. But
charity must be built of justice. It cannot
supersede justice.
What is wrong with the condition of labour
through the Christian world is, that labour is
robbed. And while you justify the continuance
of that robbery it is idle to urge charity. To do
so-to commend charity as a substitute for
justice, is indeed something akin in essence to
those heresies, condemned by your predecessors,
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
143
that taught that the Gospel had superseded the
law, and that the love of God exempted men
from moral obligations.
All that charity can do, where injustice exists,
is here and there to somewhat mollify the effects
of injustice. It cannot cure them. Nor is even
what little it can do to mollify the effects of in-
justice without evil. For what may be called
the superimposed, and in this sense, secondary
virtues, work evil where the fundamental or
primary virtues are absent. Thus sobriety is a
virtue and diligence is a virtue. But a sober
and diligent thief is all the more dangerous.
Thus patience is a virtue. But patience under
wrong is the condoning of wrong. Thus it is a
virtue to seek knowledge and to endeavour to
cultivate the mental powers. But the wicked
man becomes more capable of evil by reason of
his intelligence. Devils we always think of as
intelligent.
And thus that pseudo charity that discards
and denies justice works evil. On the one side,
it demoralises its recipients, outraging that
human dignity which, as you say, "God himself
treats with reverence," and turning into beggars
and paupers men who to become self-supporting,
self-respecting citizens only need the restitution
144
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
of what God has given them. On the other
side, it acts as an anodyne to the consciences of
those who are living on the robbery of their
fellows, and fosters that moral delusion and
spiritual pride that Christ doubtless had in mind
when He said it was easier for a camel to pass
through the eye of a needle than for a rich man
to enter the kingdom of Heaven. For it leads
men steeped in injustice, and using their money
and their influence to bolster up injustice, to
think that in giving alms they are doing some-
thing more than their duty towards man and
deserve to be very well thought of by God, and
in a vague way to attribute to their own good-
ness what really belongs to God's goodness.
For consider: Who is the All-provider? Who
is it that as you say,
owes to man a storehouse
that shall never fail," and which "he finds only
in the inexhaustible fertility of the earth"? Is it
not God? And when, therefore, men, deprived
of the bounty of their God, are made dependent
on the bounty of their fellow-creatures, are not
these creatures, as it were, put in the place of
God, to take credit to themselves for paying
obligations that you yourself say God owes?
66
But worse perhaps than all else is the way in
which this substituting of vague injunctions to
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
145
charity for the clear-cut demands of justice
opens an easy means for the professed teachers
of the Christian religion of all branches and
communions to placate Mammon while persuad-
ing themselves that they are serving God. Had
the English clergy not subordinated the teaching
of justice to the teaching of charity--to go no
further in illustrating a principle of which the
whole history of Christendom from Constantine's
time to our own is witness-the Tudor tyranny
would never have arisen, and the separation of
the Church been averted; had the clergy of
France never substituted charity for justice, the
monstrous iniquities of the ancient régime would
never have brought the horrors of the Great Revo-
lution; and in my own country had those who
should have preached justice not satisfied them-
selves with preaching kindness, chattel slavery
could never have demanded the holocaust of our
civil war.
No, your Holiness; as Faith without works
is dead, as men cannot give to God His due
while denying to their fellows the rights He
gave them, so charity, unsupported by justice, can
do nothing to solve the problem of the existing
condition of labour. Though the rich were to
"bestow all their goods to feed the poor and
K
146
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR..
give their bodies to be burned," poverty would
continue while property in land continues.
Take the case of the rich man to-day who is
honestly desirous of devoting his wealth to the
improvement of the condition of labour. What
can he do?
Bestow his wealth on those who need it? He
may help some who deserve it, but will not im-
prove general conditions. And against the good
do will be the danger of doing harm.
Build churches ? Under the shadow of
churches poverty festers and the vice that is
born of it breeds!
he
may
Build schools and colleges? Save as it may
lead men to see the iniquity of private property
in land, increased education can effect nothing
for mere labourers, for as education is diffused
the wages of education sink!
Establish hospitals? Why, already it seems
to labourers that there are too many seeking
work, and to save and prolong life is to add to
the pressure!
Build model tenements? Unless he cheapens
house accommodations he but drives further the
class he would benefit, and as he cheapens
house accommodation he brings more to seek
employment, and cheapens wages!
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
147
Institute laboratories, scientific schools, work-
shops for physical experiments? He but stimu-
lates invention and discovery, the very forces
that, acting on a society based on private pro-
perty in land, are crushing labour as between
the upper and the nether millstone!
Promote emigration from places where wages
are low to places where they are somewhat
higher? If he does, even those whom he at
first helps to emigrate will soon turn on him to
demand that such emigration shall be stopped as
reducing their wages!
Give away what land he may have, or refuse
to take rent for it, or let it at lower rents than
the market price? He will simply make new
land-owners or partial land-owners; he may make
some individuals the richer, but he will do no-
thing to improve the general condition of labour.
Or, bethinking himself of those public spirited
citizens of classic times who spent great sums in
improving their native cities, shall he try to
beautify the city of his birth or adoption? Let
him widen and straighten narrow and crooked
streets, let him build parks and erect fountains,
let him open tramways and bring in railroads, or
in any way make beautiful and attractive his
chosen city, and what will be the result? Must
148
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
it not be that those who appropriate God's
bounty will take his also? Will it not be that
the value of land will go up, and that the net
result of his benefactions will be an increase of
rents and a bounty to land-owners? Why, even
the mere announcement that he is going to do
such things will start speculation and send up the
value of land by leaps and bounds.
What, then, can the rich man do to improve
the condition of labour?
He can do nothing at all except to use his
strength for the abolition of the great primary
wrong that robs men of their birthright. The
justice of God laughs at the attempts of men to
substitute anything else for it.
If, when in speaking of the practical measures
your Holiness proposes, I did not note the moral
injunctions that the Encyclical contains, it is not
because I do not think morality practical. On
the contrary, it seems to us that in the teachings
of morality is to be found the highest practicality,
and that the question, What is wise? may al-
ways safely be subordinated to the question,
What is right? But your Holiness in the
Encyclical expressly deprives the moral truths
you state of all real bearing on the condition of
labour, just as the American people, by their
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
149
legalisation of chattel slavery, used to deprive of
all practical meaning the declaration they deem
their fundamental charter, and were accustomed
to read solemnly on every national anniversary.
That declaration asserts that "We hold these
truths to be self-evident that all men are created
equal and are endowed by their Creator with
certain unalienable rights; that among these are
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." But
what did this truth mean on the lips of men who
asserted that one man was the rightful property
of another man who had bought him, who
asserted that the slave was robbing the master in
running away, and that the man or the woman
who helped the fugitive to escape, or even gave
him a cup of cold water in Christ's name, was an
accessory to theft, on whose head the penalties
of the State should be visited?
Consider the moral teachings of the Ency-
clical :
You tell us that the necessity of labour is a
consequence of original sin. Yet you support a
system that exempts a privileged class from the
necessity for labour, and enables them to
shift their share and much more than their share
of labour on others.
You tell us that God has not created us for
150
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
the perishable and the transitory things of earth,
but has given us this world as a place of exile
and not as our true country. Yet you tell us
that some of the exiles have the exclusive right
of ownership in this place of common exile,
so that they may compel their fellow-exiles to
pay them for sojourning here, and that this ex-
clusive ownership they may transfer to other
exiles yet to come with the same right of exclud-
ing their fellows.
You tell us that virtue is the common inheri-
tance of all; that all men are children of God the
common Father; that all have the same last end;
that all are redeemed by Jesus Christ; that the
blessings of nature and the gifts of grace belong
in common to all, and that to all except the un-
worthy is promised the inheritance of the King-
dom of Heaven! Yet in all this and through
all this you insist as a moral duty on the
maintenance of a system that makes the re-
servoir of all God's material bounties and
blessings to man the exclusive property of
a few of their number-you give us equal
rights in heaven but deny us equal rights
on earth!
It was said of a famous decision of the
Supreme Court of the United States made just
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
151
before the civil war, in a fugitive slave case,
that "it gave the law to the North and the
nigger to the South." It is thus that your
Encyclical gives the Gospel to labourers and the
earth to the landlords. Is it really to be
wondered at that there are those who sneeringly
say, "The priests are ready enough to give the
poor an equal share in all that is out of sight,
but they take precious good care that the rich
shall keep a tight grip on all that is within
sight."
Herein is the reason why the working masses.
all over the world are turning away from organ-
ised religion.
And why should they not? What is the
office of religion if not to point out the prin-
ciples that ought to govern the conduct of men
towards each other; to furnish a clear, decisive
rule of right which shall guide men in all the
relations of life-in the workshop, in the mart,
in the forum and in the senate, as well as in the
church; to supply, as it were, a compass by
which, amid the blasts of passion, the aberra-
tions of greed and the delusions of a short-
sighted expediency men may safely steer?
What is the use of a religion that stands pal-
sied and paltering in the face of the most
152
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
momentous problems? What is the use of a
religion that whatever it may promise for the
next world can do nothing to prevent injustice
in this? Early Christianity was not such a
religion, else it would never have encountered
the Roman persecutions; else it would never
have swept the Roman world. The sceptical
masters of Rome, tolerant of all gods, careless
of what they deemed vulgar superstitions, were
keenly sensitive to a doctrine based on equal
rights; they feared instinctively a religion that
inspired slave and proletarian with a new hope;
that took for its central figure a crucified car-
penter; that taught the equal fatherhood of
God and the equal brotherhood of men; that
looked for the speedy reign of justice, and that
prayed, "Thy Kingdom come on Earth!"
To-day, the same perceptions, the same aspira-
tions, exist among the masses. Man is, as he
has been called, a religious animal, and can
never quite rid himself of the feeling that there
is some moral government of the world, some
eternal distinction between wrong and right;
can never quite abandon the yearning for a
reign of righteousness. And to-day, men who,
as they think, have cast off all belief in religion,
will tell you, even though they know not what
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
153
་
it is, that with regard to the condition of labour
something is wrong! If theology be, as St.
Thomas of Aquin held it, the sum and focus of
the sciences, is it not the business of religion to
say clearly and fearlessly what that wrong is?
It was by a deep impulse that of old, when
threatened and perplexed by general disaster,
men came to the oracles to ask, in what have
we offended the gods? To-day, menaced by
growing evils that threaten the very existence
of society, men, conscious that something is
wrong, are putting the same question to the
ministers of religion. What is the answer they
get? Alas, with few exceptions, it is as vague,
as inadequate, as the answers that used to come
from heathen oracles.
Is it any wonder that the masses of men are
losing faith?
Let me again state the case that your En-
cyclical presents.
What is that condition of labour which as
you truly say is "the question of the hour," and
"fills every mind with painful apprehension"?
Reduced to its lowest expression it is the poverty
of men willing to work. And what is the lowest
expression of this phrase? It is that they lack
154
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
bread-for in that one word we most concisely
and strongly express all the manifold material
satisfactions needed by humanity, the absence of
which constitutes poverty.
Now, what is the prayer of Christendom-
the universal prayer; the prayer that goes up
daily and hourly wherever the name of Christ is
honoured; that ascends from your Holiness at
the high altar of St. Peter's, and that is repeated
by the youngest child that the poorest Christian
mother has taught to lisp a request to her Father
in Heaven? It is, "Give us this day our daily
bread!"
Yet where this prayer goes up, daily and
hourly, men lack bread. Is it not the business
of religion to say why? If it cannot do so,
shall not scoffers mock its ministers as Elias
mocked the prophets of Baal, saying, "Cry
with a louder voice, for he is a god; and per-
haps he is talking, or is in an inn, or on a journey,
or perhaps he is asleep, and must be awakened?'
What answer can those ministers give? Either
there is no God, or He is asleep, or else He does
give men their daily bread, and it is in some
way intercepted.
Here is the answer, the only true answer :
If men lack bread it is not that God has not
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
155
done His part in providing it. If men willing
to labour are cursed with poverty, it is not that
the storehouse that God owes men has failed;
that the daily supply He has promised for the
daily wants of His children is not here in abun-
dance. It is, that impiously violating the
benevolent intentions of their Creator, men have
made land private property, and thus given into
the exclusive ownership of the few the provision
that a bountiful Father has made for all.
Any other answer than that, no matter how it
may be shrouded in the mere forms of religion,
is practically an atheistical answer.
I have written this letter not alone for your
Holiness, but for all whom I may hope it to
reach. But in sending it to you personally, and
in advance of publication, I trust that it may be
by you personally read and weighed. In setting
forth the grounds of our belief, and in pointing
out considerations which it seems to us you
have unfortunately overlooked, I have written
frankly, as was my duty on a matter of such
momentous importance, and as I am sure you
would have me write. But I trust I have done
so without offence. For your office I have pro-
found respect, for yourself personally the highest
156
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
esteem.
And while the views I have opposed
seem to us erroneous and dangerous, we do not
wish to be understood as in the slightest degree
questioning either your sincerity or intelligence
in adopting them. For they are views all but
universally held by the professed religious
teachers of Christendom, in all communions and
creeds, and that have received the sanction of
those looked to as the wise and learned. Under
the conditions that have surrounded you, and
under the pressure of so many high duties and
responsibilities, culminating in those of your
present exalted position, it is not to be expected
that you should have hitherto thought to ques
tion them. But I trust that the considerations
herein set forth may induce you to do so, and
even if the burdens and cares that beset you
shall now make impossible the careful considera-
tion that should precede expression by one in
your responsible position, I trust that what I
have written may not be without use to others.
And, as I have said, we are deeply grateful
for your Encyclical. It is much that by so
conspicuously calling attention to the condition
of labour, you have recalled the fact forgotten
by so many, that the social evils and problems
of our time directly and pressingly concern the
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
157
Church. It is much that you should thus have
placed the stamp of your disapproval on that
impious doctrine which directly and by implica-
tion has been so long and so widely preached in
the name of Christianity, that the sufferings of
the poor are due to mysterious decrees of Pro-
vidence which men may lament but cannot alter.
Your Encyclical will be seen by those who care-
fully analyse it to be directed, not against
Socialism, which in moderate form you favour,
but against what we in the United States call
the single tax. Yet, we have no solicitude for
the truth, save that it shall be brought into dis-
cussion, and we recognise in your Holiness' En-
cyclical a most efficient means of promoting
discussion, and of promoting discussion along
the lines that we deem of the greatest import-
ance the lines of morality and religion. In
this you deserve the gratitude of all who would
follow truth, for it is of the nature of truth al-
ways to prevail over error where discussion goes
on.
And the truth for which we stand has now
made such progress in the minds of men that it
must be heard, that it can never be stifled; that
it must go on conquering and to conquer. Far
off Australia leads the van, and has already
158
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
taken the first steps towards the single tax. In
Great Britain, in the United States, and in
Canada, the question is on the verge of practical
politics and soon will be the burning issue of the
time. Continental Europe cannot long linger
behind. Faster than ever the world is moving.
Forty years ago slavery seemed stronger in
the United States than ever before, and the
market price of slaves-both working slaves and
breeding slaves-was higher than it had ever
been before, for the title of the owner seemed
growing more secure. In the shadow of the
Hall where the equal rights of man had been
solemnly proclaimed, the manacled fugitive was
dragged back to bondage, and on what to
American tradition was our Marathon of free-
dom, the slave master boasted that he would
yet call the roll of his chattels.
Yet forty years ago, though the party that
was to place Abraham Lincoln in the Presi-
dental chair had not been formed, and seven
years were yet to pass ere the signal gun was to
ring out, slavery, as we may now see, was
doomed.
To-day a wider, deeper, more beneficent re-
volution is brooding, not over one country, but
over the world. God's truth impels it, and
1
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
159
man urge it on.
forces mightier than He has ever before given to
It is no more in the power of
stay it than it is in man's
The stars in their courses fight
vested wrongs to
to stay the sun.
power
against Sisera, and in the ferment of to-day, to
him who hath ears to hear, the doom of indus-
trial slavery is sealed.
Where shall the dignitaries of the Church be
in the struggle that is coming, nay, that is al-
ready here?
On the side of justice and liberty,
or on the side of wrong and slavery? with the
delivered when the timbrels shall sound again,
or with the chariots and the horsemen that again
shall be engulfed in the sea?
As to the masses, there is little fear where
they will be. Already, among those who hold
it with religious fervour, the single tax counts
great numbers of Catholics, many priests, secular
and regular, and at least some bishops, while
there is no communion or denomination of the
many into which English-speaking Christians are
divided where its advocates are not to be found.
Last Sunday evening in the New York church
that of all churches in the world is most richly
endowed, I saw the cross carried through its
aisles by a hundred choristers, and heard a
priest of that English branch of the Church that
160
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
three hundred years since was separated from
your obedience, declare to a great congregation
that the labour question was at bottom a relig
ious question; that it could only be settled on
the basis of moral right; that the first and clear-
est of rights is the equal right to the use of the
physical basis of all life; and that no human
titles could set aside God's gift of the land to all
men.
And as the Cross moved by, and the choris
ters sang,
"Raise ye the Christian's war-cry-
The Cross of Christ the Lord!"
men, to whom it was a new thing, bowed their
heads, and in hearts long steeled against the
Church, as the willing handmaid of oppression,
rose the "God wills it!" of the grandest and
mightiest of crusades.
Servant of the Servants of God! I call you
by the strongest and sweetest of your titles. In
your hands more than in those of any living man
lies the power to say the word and make the
sign that shall end an unnatural divorce, and
marry again to religion all that is pure and high
in social aspiration.
THE CONDITION ÓF LABOUR.
161
Wishing for your Holiness the chiefest of all
blessings, that you may know the truth and be
freed by the truth; wishing for you the days
and the strength that may enable you by the
great service you may render to humanity to
make your pontificate through all coming time
most glorious; and with the profound respect due
to your personal character and to your exalted
office, I am,
Yours sincerely,
HENRY GEORGE.
NEW YORK, September 11th, 1891.
THE END.
I
APPENDIX.
ENCYCLICAL LETTER OF POPE LEO XIII.
TO OUR VENERABLE BRETHREN,
ALL PATRIARCHS, PRIMATES, ARCHBISHOPS, AND BISHOPS OF THE
CATHOLIC WOrld,
IN GRACE AND COMMUNION WITH THE APOSTOLIC SEE,
POPE LEO XIII.
VENERABLE BRETHREN, HEALTH AND APOSTOLIC BENEDICTION.
THE MODERN REVOLUTIONARY SPIRIT.
1. It is not surprising that the spirit of revolutionary change,
which has so long been predominant in the nations of the world,
should have passed beyond politics and made its influence felt in the
cognate field of practical economy. The elements of a conflict are
unmistakable:the growth of industry, and the surprising discoveries
of science; the changed relations of masters and workmen; the
enormous fortunes of individuals, and the poverty of the masses;
the increased self-reliance and the closer mutual combination of the
working population; and, finally, a general moral deterioration.
The momentous seriousness of the present state of things just now
fills every mind with painful apprehension; wise men discuss it;
practical men propose schemes; popular meetings, legislatures, and
sovereign princes, all are occupied with it—and there is nothing
which has a deeper hold on public attention.
2. Therefore, venerable brethren, as on former occasions, when
it seemed opportune to refute false teaching, we have addressed you
in the interests of the Church and of the common weal, and have
issued Letters on Political Power, on Human Liberty, on the Chris-
tian Constitution of the State, and on similar subjects, so now we
have thought it useful to speak on
164
APPENDIX.
THE CONDITION OF LABOUR.
3. It is a matter on which we have touched once or twice already.
But in this letter the responsibility of the Apostolic office urges us
to treat the question expressly and at length, in order that there
may be no mistake as to the principles which truth and justice dictate
for its settlement. The discussion is not easy, nor is it free from
danger. It is not easy to define the relative rights and the mutual
duties of the wealthy and of the poor, of capital and of labour. And
the danger lies in this, that crafty agitators constantly make use of
these disputes to pervert men's judgments and to stir up the people
to sedition.
THE MISERY OF THE POOR NEEDS ALLEVIATION.
4. But all agree, and there can be no question whatever, that some
remedy must be found, and quickly found, for the misery and
wretchedness which press so heavily at this moment on the large
majority of the very poor. The ancient workmen's Guilds were
destroyed in the last century, and no other organisation took their
place. Public institutions and the laws have repudiated the ancient
religion. Hence, by degrees, it has come to pass that working-men
have been given over, isolated and defenceless, to the callousness of
employers and the greed of unrestrained competition. The evil has
been increased by rapacious usury, which, although more than once
condemned by the Church, is nevertheless, under a different form,
but with the same guilt, still practised by avaricious and grasping
men. And to this must be added the custom of working by con
tract, and the concentration of so many branches of trade in the
hands of a few individuals, so that a small number of very rich men
have been able to lay upon the masses of the poor a yoke little better
than slavery itself.
THE SOCIALIST SCHEME: THE DESTRUCTION OF PRIVATE PROPERTY.
5. To remedy these evils the Socialists, working on the poor man's
envy of the rich, endeavour to destroy private property, and main-
tain that individual possessions should become the common property
of all, to be administered by the State or by municipal bodies. They
hold that, by thus transferring property from private persons to the
community, the present evil state of things will be set to rights, be-
cause each citizen will then have his equal share of whatever there
is to enjoy. But their proposals are so clearly futile for all practical
purposes that, if they were carried out, the working-man himself
would be among the first to suffer. Moreover, they are emphatically
APPENDIX.
165
unjust, because they would rob the lawful possessor, bring the State
into a sphere that is not its own, and cause complete confusion in
the community.
6. It is surely undeniable that, when a man engages in remunera-
tive labour, the very reason and motive of his work is to obtain pro-
perty, and to hold it as his own private possession. If one man hires
out to another his strength or his industry, he does this for the pur-
pose of receiving in return what is necessary for food and living; he
thereby expressly proposes to acquire a full and real right, not only
to the remuneration, but also to the disposal of that remuneration
as he pleases. Thus, if he lives sparingly, saves money, and invests
his savings, for greater security, in land, the land, in such a case, is
only his wages in another form; and, consequently, a working-man's
little estate thus purchased should be as completely at his own dis-
posal as the wages he receives for his labour. But it is precisely in
this power of disposal that ownership consists, whether the property
be land or movable goods. The Socialists, therefore, in endeavour-
ing to transfer the possessions of individuals to the community,
strike at the interests of every wage-earner, for they deprive him of
the liberty of disposing of his wages, and thus of all hope and possi-
bility of increasing his stock and of bettering his condition in life.
PRIVATE PROPERTY A NATURAL RIGHT.
7. What is of still greater importance, however, is that the
remedy they propose is manifestly against justice. For every man
has by nature the right to possess property as his own. This is
one of the chief points of distinction between man and the animal
creation. For the brute has no power of self-direction, but is
governed by two chief instincts, which keep his powers alert, move
him to use his strength, and determine him to action without the
power of choice. These instincts are self-preservation and the pro-
pagation of the species. Both can attain their purpose by means of
things which are close at hand; beyond their surroundings the
brute creation cannot go, for they are moved to action by sensibility
alone, and by the things which sense perceives. But with man it is
different indeed. He possesses, on the one hand, the full perfection
of animal nature, and, therefore, he enjoys, at least as much as the
rest of the animal race, the fruition of the things of the body. But
animality, however perfect, is far from being the whole of humanity,
and is, indeed, humanity's humble handmaid, made to serve and
obey. It is the mind, or the reason, which is the chief thing in us
166
APPENDIX,
who are human beings; it is this which makes a human being
human, and distinguishes him essentially and completely from the
brute. And on this account-viz. that man alone among animals
possesses reason-it must be within his right to have things not
merely for temporary and momentary use, as other living beings
have them, but in stable and permanent possession; he must have
not only things which perish in the using, but also those which,
though used, remain for use in the future.
8. This becomes still more clearly evident if we consider man's
nature a little more deeply. For man, comprehending by the power
of his reason things innumerable, and joining the future with the
present-being, moreover, the master of his own acts-governs
himself by the foresight of his counsel, under the eternal law and
the power of God, whose providence governs all things. Where-
fore, it is in his power to exercise his choice not only on things which
regard his present welfare, but also on those which will be for his
advantage in time to come. Hence, man not only can possess the
fruits of the earth, but also the earth itself; for, of the products of
the earth he can make provision for the future. Man's needs do not
die out, but recur; satisfied to-day, they demand new supplies to-
morrow. Nature, 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.
گور عدم الاساء
9. Nor must we, at this stage, have recourse to the State. Man
is older than the State; and he holds the right of providing for the
life of his body prior to the formation of any State. And to say
that God has given the earth to the use and enjoyment of the
universal human race is not to deny that there can be private pro-
perty. For God has granted the earth to mankind in general; not
in the sense that all without distinction can deal with it as they
please, but rather that no part of it has been assigned to any one in
particular, and that the limits of private possession have been left to
be fixed by man's own industry and the laws of individual peoples.
Moreover, the earth, though divided among private owners, ceases
not thereby to minister to the needs of all; for there is no one who
does not live on what the land brings forth. Those who do not
possess the soil contribute their labour; so that it may be truly
said that all human subsistence is derived either from labour on
one's own land, or from some laborious industry which is paid for
either in the produce of the land itself or in that which is exchanged
for what the land brings forth.

APPENDIX.
167
10. Here, again, we have another proof that private ownership is
according to Nature's law. For that which is required for the pre-
servation of life, and for life's well-being, is produced in great
abundance by the earth, but not until man has brought it into
cultivation, and lavished upon it his care and skill. Now, when
man thus spends the industry of his mind and the strength of his
body in procuring the fruits of Nature, by that act he makes his
own that portion of Nature's field which he cultivates-that portion
on which he leaves, as it were, the impress of his own personality;
and it cannot but be just that he should possess that portion as his
own, and should have a right to keep it without molestation.
COMMUNISM IS ROBBERY.
11. These arguments are so strong and convincing that it seems
surprising that certain obsolete opinions should now be revived in
opposition to what is here laid down. We are told that it is right
for private persons to have the use of the soil and the fruits of their
land, but that it is unjust for any one to possess as owner either the
land on which he has built or the estate which he has cultivated.
But those who assert this do not perceive that they are robbing man
of what his own labour has produced. For the soil which is tilled
and cultivated with toil and skill utterly changes its condition; it
was wild before, it is now fruitful; it was barren, and now it brings
forth in abundance. That which has thus altered and improved, it
becomes so truly part of itself as to be in great measure indistin-
guishable and inseparable from it. Is it just that the fruit of a
man's sweat and labour should be enjoyed by another? As effects
follow their cause, so it is just and right that the results of labour
should belong to him who has laboured.
PRIVATE PROPERTY CONSECRATED.
12. With reason, therefore, the common opinion of mankind, little
affected by the few dissentients who have maintained the opposite
view, has found in the study of Nature, and in the law of Nature
herself, the foundations of the division of property, and has con-
secrated by the practice of all ages the principle of private owner-
ship, as being pre-eminently in conformity with human nature, and
as conducing in the most unmistakable manner to the peace and
tranquillity of human life. The same principle is confirmed and
enforced by the civil laws-laws which, as long as they are just,
derive their binding force from the law of Nature. The authority
168
APPENDIX.
of the Divine Law adds its sanction, forbidding us in the gravest
terms even to covet that which is another's:-Thou shalt not covet
thy neighbour's wife; nor his house, nor his field, nor his man-servant,
nor his maid-servant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything which is his
(Deuteronomy v. 21).
MAN'S SOCIAL AND DOMESTIC OBLIGATIONS.
13. The rights here spoken of, belonging to each individual man,
are seen in a much stronger light if they are considered in relation
to man's social and domestic obligations.
In choosing a state of life, it is indisputable that all are at full
liberty either to follow the counsel of Jesus Christ as to virginity,
or to enter into the bonds of marriage. No human law can abolish
the natural and primitive right of marriage, or in any way limit the
chief and principal purpose of marriage, ordained by God's authority
from the beginning. Increase and multiply (Genesis i. 28).
we have the family; the "society" of a man's own household; a
society limited indeed in numbers, but a true "society," anterior to
every kind of State or nation, with rights and duties of his own,
totally independent of the commonwealth.
Thus
14. That right of property, therefore, which has been proved to
belong naturally to individual persons, inust also belong to a man
in his capacity of head of a family; nay, such a person must possess
this right so much the more clearly in proportion as his position
multiplies his duties. For 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 honourably
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. A family, no less than a State, is, as we
have said, a true society, governed by a power within itself—that is
to say, by the father. Wherefore, provided the limits be not trans-
gressed which are prescribed by the very purposes for which it exists,
the family has at least equal rights with the State in the choice and
pursuit of those things which are needful to its preservation and its
just liberty.
15. We say, at least equal rights; for, since the domestic house-
hold is anterior both in idea and in fact to the gathering of men into

APPENDIX.
169
a commonwealth, the former must necessarily have rights and duties
which are prior to those of the latter, and which rest more immedi-
ately on Nature. If the citizens of a State-that is to say the fami-
lies—on entering into association and fellowship, experienced at the
hands of the State hindrance instead of help, and found their rights
attacked instead of being protected, such association were rather to
be repudiated than sought after.
UNRESTRICTED STATE INTERFERENCE CONDEMNed.
16. The idea, then, that the Civil Government should, at its own
discretion, penetrate and pervade the family and the household, is
a great and pernicious mistake. True, if a family finds itself in
great difficulty, utterly friendless, and without prospect of help, it
is right that extreme necessity be met by public aid; for each family
is a part of the commonwealth. In like manner, if within the walls
of the household there occur grave disturbance of mutual rights, the
public power must interfere to force each party to give the other
what is due; for this is not to rob citizens of their rights, but justly
and properly to safeguard and strengthen them. But the rulers of
the State must go no further: Nature bids them stop here. Paternal
authority can neither be abolished by the State, nor absorbed; for it
has the same source as human life itself. "The child belongs to the
father," and is, as it were, the continuation of the father's person-
ality; and, to speak with strictness, the child takes its place in
civil society not in its own rights, but in its quality as a member of
the family in which it is begotten. And it is for the very reason that
"the child belongs to the father" that, as St. Thomas of Aquin says,
"before it attains the use of freewill, it is in the power and care of
its parents" (St. Thomas's Summa Theologica, 2a 2æ Q. x. Art. 12).
The Socialists, therefore, in setting aside the parent and introduc-
ing the providence of the State, act against natural justice, and
threaten the very existence of family life.
17. And such interference is not only unjust, but is quite certain
to harass and disturb all classes of citizens and to subject them to
odious and intolerable slavery. It would open the door to envy, to
evil speaking, and to quarrelling; the sources of wealth would them-
selves run dry, for no one would have any interest in exerting his
talents or his industry; and that ideal equality of which so much is
said would in reality be the levelling down of all to the same con-
dition of misery and dishonour.
18. Thus it is clear that the main tenet of Socialism, the com-
170
APPENDIX.
1
munity of goods, must be utterly rejected; for it would injure those
whom it is intended to benefit, it would be contrary to the natural
rights of mankind, and it would introduce confusion and disorder
into the commonwealth. Our first and most fundamental principle,
therefore, when we undertake to alleviate the condition of the
masses, must be the inviolability of private property. This laid
down, we go on to show where we must find the remedy that we
seek.
THE SOLUTION REQUIRES RELIGION.
19. We approach the subject with confidence, and in the exercise
of the rights which belong to us. For no practical solution of this
question will ever be found without the assistance of Religion and
of the Church. It is we who are the chief guardians of Religion and
the chief dispenser of what belongs to the Church, and we must not
by silence neglect the duty which lies upon us. Doubtless this most
serious question demands the attention and the efforts of others
besides ourselves-of the rulers of States, of employers of labour, of
the wealthy, and of the working population themselves, for whom
we plead. But we affirm without hesitation that all the striving of
men will be vain if we leave out the Church. It is the Church that
proclaims from the Gospel those teachings by which the conflict can
be put an end to, or, at the least, made far less bitter; the Church
uses its efforts not only to enlighten the mind, but to direct by its
precepts the life and conduct of men; the Church improves and
ameliorates the condition of the working-man by numerous useful
organisations; does its best to enlist the services of all ranks in dis-
cussing and endeavouring to meet, in the most practical way, the
claims of the working classes; and acts on the decided view that for
these purposes recourse should be had, in due measure and degree,
to the help of the law and of the State authority.
ALL MEN ARE NOT EQUAL.
20. Let it be laid down, in the first place, that humanity must remain
as it is.
It is impossible to reduce human society to a level. The
Socialists may do their utmost, but all striving against Nature is vain.
There naturally exist among mankind innumerable differences of the
most important kind; people differ in capability, in diligence, in
health, and in strength; and unequal fortune is a necessary result
of inequality in condition. Such inequality is far from being disad-
vantageous either to individuals or to the community; social and
public life can only go on by the help of various kinds of capacity
:
:
1
APPENDIX.
171
and the playing of many parts; and each man, as a rule, chooses
the part which peculiarly suits his case. As regards bodily labour,
even had man never fallen from the state of innocence, he would
not have been wholly unoccupied; but that which would then have
been his free choice and his delight, became afterwards compulsory,
and the painful expiation of sin. Cursed be the earth in thy work ;
in thy labour thou shalt eat of it all the days of thy life (Genesis
ii. 17). In like manner, the other pains and hardships of life will
have no end or cessation on this earth; for the consequences of sin
are bitter and hard to bear, and they must be with man as long as
life lasts. To suffer and to endure, therefore, is the lot of humanity; A
let men try as they may, no strength and no artifice will ever suc-
ceed in banishing from human life the ills and troubles which beseti
it. If any there are who pretend differently-who hold out to a
hard-pressed people freedom from pain and trouble, undisturbed
repose, and constant enjoyment-they cheat the people and impose
upon them, and their lying promises will only make the evil
worse than before. There is nothing more useful than to look at
the world as it really is-and at the same time to look elsewhere for
a remedy to its troubles.
RICH AND POOR MUST WORK IN PEACE.
21. The great mistake that is made in the matter now under con-
sideration is to possess oneself of the idea that class is naturally
hostile to class; that rich and poor are intended by Nature to live at
war with one another. So irrational and so false is this view that
the exact contrary is the truth. Just as the symmetry of the human
body is the result of the disposition of the members of the body, so
in a State it is ordained by Nature that these two classes should exist
in harmony and agreement, and should, as it were, fit into one an-
other, so as to maintain the equilibrium of the body politic. Each
requires the other; capital cannot do without labour, nor labour
without capital. Mutual agreement results in pleasantness and
good order; perpetual conflict necessarily produces confusion and
outrage. Now, in preventing such strife as this, and in making it
possible, the efficacy of Christianity is marvellous and manifold.
First of all, there is nothing more powerful than Religion (of which
the Church is the interpreter and guardian) in drawing rich and
poor together, by reminding each class of its duties to the other,
and especially of the duties of justice. Thus Religion teaches the
labouring man and the workman to carry out honestly and well all
equitable agreements freely made; never to injure capital, or to
172
APPENDIX.
outrage the person of an employer; never to employ violence in re-
presenting his own cause, or to engage in riot or disorder; and to
have nothing to do with men of evil principles, who work upon the
people with artful promises and raise foolish hopes which usually
end in disaster and in repentance when too late. Religion teaches
the rich man and the employer that their work-people are not their
slaves; that they must respect in every man his dignity as a man
and as a Christian; that labour is nothing to be ashamed of, if we
listen to right reason and to Christian philosophy, but is an honour-
able employment, enabling a man to sustain his life in an upright
and creditable way; and that it is shameful and inhuman to treat
men like chattels to make money by, or to look upon them merely as
so much muscle or physical power. Thus, again, Religion teaches
that, as among the workman's concerns are Religion herself and
things spiritual and mental, the employer is bound to see that he
has time for the duties of piety; that he be not exposed to corrupt-
ing influences and dangerous occasions; and that he be not led away
to neglect his home and family or to squander his wages. Then,
again, the employer must never tax his work-people beyond their
strength, nor employ them in work unsuited to their sex or age.
His great and principal obligation is to give to every one that which
is just. Doubtless, before we can decide whether wages are ade-
quate, many things have to be considered; but rich men and masters
should remember this-that to exercise pressure for the sake of gain
upon the indigent and the destitute, and to make one's profit out of
the need of another, is condemned by all laws, human and divine.
To defraud any one of wages that are his due is a crime which cries
to the avenging anger of Heaven. Behold, the hire of the labourers
which by fraud hath been kept back by you, crieth; and the cry
of them hath entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth (St. James
v. 4). Finally, the rich must religiously refrain from cutting down
the workman's earnings, either by force, by fraud, or by usurious
dealing; and with the more reason because the poor man is weak
and unprotected, and because his slender means should be sacred in
proportion to their scantiness.
22. Were these precepts carefully obeyed and followed, would
not strife die out and cease?
CHARITY AND GOOD UNDERSTANDING ARE ALSO NECESSARY.
23. But the Church, with Jesus Christ for its Master and Guide,
aims higher still. It lays down precepts yet more perfect, and tries
APPENDIX.
173
to bind class to class in friendliness and good understanding The
things of this earth cannot be understood or valued rightly without
taking into consideration the life to come, the life that will last for
ever. Exclude the idea of futurity. and the very notion of what is
good and right would perish; nay, the whole system of the universe
would become a dark and unfathomable mystery. The great truth
which we learn from Nature herself is also the grand Christian
dogina on which Religion rests as on its base-that when we have
done with this present life then we shall really begin to live. God
has not created us for the perishable and transitory things of earth,
but for things heavenly and everlasting; He has given us this world
as a place of exile, and not as our true country. Money, and the
other things which men call good and desirable-we may have them in
abundance, or we may want them altogether; as far as eternal happi-
ness is concerned, it is no matter; the only thing that is important
is to use them aright. Jesus Christ, when He redeemed us with
plentiful redemption, took not away the pains and sorrows which in
such large proportion make up the texture of our mortal life; He
transformed them into motives of virtue and occasions of merit: and
no man can hope for eternal reward unless he follow in the blood-
stained footprints of his Saviour. If we suffer with Him we shall also
reign with Him (2 Timothy ii. 12). His labours and His sufferings,
accepted by His own freewill, have marvellously sweetened all
suffering and all labour. And not only by His example, but by His
grace and by the hope of everlasting recompense, He has made pain
and grief more easy to endure; for that which is at present momentary
and light of our tribulation worketh for us above measure exceedingly
an eternal weight of glory (2 Corinthians iv. 17).
CHARITY COMMANDED.
24. Therefore those whom fortune favours are warned that free-
dom from sorrow, and abundance of earthly riches, are no guarantee
of the beatitude that shall never end, but rather the contrary (St.
Matthew xix. 23, 24); that the rich should tremble at the threaten-
ings of Jesus Christ-threatenings so strange in the mouth of Our
Lord (St. Luke vi. 24, 25); and that a most strict account must be
given to the Supreme Judge for all that we possess. The chiefest
and most excellent rule for the right use of money is one which the
heathen philosophers indicated, but which the Church has traced
out clearly, and has not only made known to men's minds, but has
impressed upon their lives. It rests on the principle that it is one
174
APPENDIX.
thing to have a right to the possession of money, and another to have
a right to use money as one pleases. Private ownership, as
we have seen, is the natural right of man; and to exercise that right,
especially as members of society, is not only lawful, but absolutely
necessary. It is lawful, says St. Thomas of Aquin, for a man to
hold private property; and it is also necessary for the carrying on of
human life (2a 2æ Q. lxvi. Art. 2). But if the question be asked,
How must one's possessions be used? the Church replies without
hesitation in the words of the same holy Doctor: Man should not
consider his outward possessions as his own, but as common to all, so
as to share them without difficulty when others are in need. Whence
the Apostle saith, Command the rich of this world . . . to give with ease,
to communicate (Ibid. Q. lxv. Art. 2). True, no one is commanded
to distribute to others that which is required for his own necessities
and those of his household; nor even to give away what is reasonably
required to keep up becomingly his condition in life; for no one ought.
to live unbecomingly (Ibid. Q. xxxii. Art. 6). But when necessity
has been supplied, and one's position fairly considered, it is a duty
to give to the indigent out of that which is over. That which re-
maineth, give alms (St. Luke xi. 41). It is a duty, not of justice
(except in extreme cases), but of Christian charity-a duty which is
not enforced by human law. But the laws and judgments of men
must give place to the laws and judgments of Christ, the true God,
who in many ways urges on His followers the practice of almsgiving-
It is more blessed to give than to receive (Acts xx. 35); and who will
count a kindness done or refused to the poor as done or refused to
Himself as long as you did it to one of My least brethren you did it
to Me (St. Matthew xxv. 40). Thus, to sum up what has been
said:—Whoever has received from the Divine bounty a large share
of blessings, whether they be external and corporeal or gifts of the
mind, has received them for the purpose of using them for the
perfecting of his own nature, and, at the same time, that he may
employ them, as the minister of God's Providence, for the benefit of
others. He that hath a talent, says St. Gregory the Great, let him
see that he hide it not; he that hath abundance let him arouse himself
to mercy and generosity; he that hath art and skill, let him do his best
to share the use and the utility thereof with his neighbour (St. Gregory
the Great. Hom. ix. in Evangel. n. 7).
25. As for those who do not possess the gifts of fortune, they are
taught by the Church that in God's sight poverty is no disgrace,
and that there is nothing to be ashamed of in seeking one's bread by
APPENDIX.
175
labour. This is strengthened by what we see in Christ Himself,
who whereas He was rich, for our sakes became poor (2 Corinthians
viii. 9); and who, being the Son of God, and God Himself, chose to
seem and to be considered the son of a carpenter-nay, did not dis-
dain to spend a great part of His life as a carpenter Himself. Is not
this the carpenter, the Son of Mary? (St. Mark vi. 3.) From the
contemplation of this divine example it is easy to understand that
the true dignity and excellence of man lies in his moral qualities-
that is, in virtue; that virtue is the common inheritance of all,
equally within the reach of high and low, rich and poor; and that
virtue, and virtue alone, wherever found, will be followed by the
rewards of everlasting happiness. Nay, God Himself seems to incline
more to those who suffer evil; for Jesus Christ calls the poor blessed
(Blessed are the poor in spirit.-St. Matthew v. 3); He lovingly
invites those in labour and grief to come to Him for solace (Come
to Me all you that labour and are burdened and I will refresh you. —Ibid.
xi. 28); and He displays the tenderest charity to the lowly and the
oppressed. These reflections cannot fail to keep down the pride of
those who are well off, and to cheer the spirit of the afflicted; to
incline the former to generosity and the latter to tranquil resignation.
Thus the separation which pride would make tends to disappear,
nor will it be difficult to make rich and poor join hands in friendly
concord.
THUS RICH AND POOR ARE JOINED TOGETHER.
26. But, if Christian precepts prevail, the two classes will not only
be united in the bonds of friendship, but also in those of brotherly
love. For they will understand and feel that all men are the children
of the common father-that is, of God; that all have the same last
end, which is God Himself, who alone can make either men or angels
absolutely and perfectly happy; that all and each are redeemed by
Jesus Christ and raised to the dignity of children of God, and are thus
united in brotherly ties both with each other and with Jesus Christ,
the firstborn among many brethren; that the blessings of Nature and
the gifts of grace belong in common to the whole human race, and
that to all, except to those who are unworthy, is promised the in-
heritance of the Kingdom of Heaven. If sons, heirs also; heirs indeed
of God, and co-heirs of Christ (Romans viii. 17).
27. Such is the scheme of duties and of rights which is put forth
to the world by the Gospel. Would it not seem that strife must
quickly cease were society penetrated with ideas like these?
176
APPENDIX.
:
28. But the Church, not content with pointing out the remedy,
also applies it. For the Church does its utmost to teach and to
train men, and to educate them; and by means of its bishops and
clergy it diffuses its salutary teachings far and wide. It strives to
influence the mind and heart so that all may willingly yield them-
selves to be formed and guided by the commandments of God. It
is precisely in this fundamental and principal matter, on which
everything depends, that the Church has a power peculiar to itself.
The agencies which it employs are given it for the very purpose of
reaching the hearts of men, by Jesus Christ Himself, and derive their
efficiency from God. They alone can touch the innermost heart and
conscience, and bring men to act from a motive of duty, to resist
their passions and appetites, to love God and their fellow-men with
a love that is unique and supreme, and courageously to break down
every b rrier which stands in the way of a virtuous life.
HISTORY ATTESTS THE POWER OF THE CHURCH.
29. On this subject we need only recall for one moment the ex-
amples written down in history. Of these things there cannot be
the shadow of doubt; for instance, that civil society was renovated
in every part by the teachings of Christianity; that in the strength
of that renewal the human race was lifted up to better beings—nay,
that it was brought back from death to life, and to so excellent a
life that nothing more perfect had been known before, or will come
to pass in the ages that have yet to be. Of this beneficent trans-
formation, Jesus Christ was at once the first cause and the final
purpose; as from Him all came, so to Him all was to be referred.
For when, by the light of the Gospel message, the human race came
to know the grand mystery of the Incarnation of the Word and the
redemption of man, the life of Jesus Christ, God and Man, pene-
trated every race and nation, and impregnated them with His
faith, His precepts, and His laws. And if society is to be cured
now, in no other way can it be cured but by a return to the Chris-
tian life and Christian institutions. When a society is perishing,"
the true advice to give to those who would restore it is, to recall it
to the principles from which it sprung; for the purpose and per-
fection of an association is to aim at and to attain that for which it
was formed; nd its operation should be put in motion and in-
spired by the end and object which originally gave it its being.
So that to fall away from its primal constitution is disease; to go
back to it is recovery. And this may be asserted with the utmost
APPENDIX.
177
truth both of the State in general and of that body of its citizens—
by far the greater number-who sustain life by labour.
THE CHURCH DESIRES THE PALLIATION OF POVERTY.
30. Neither must it be supposed that the solicitude of the Church
is so occupied with the spiritual concerns of its children as to neglect
their interests, temporal and earthly. Its desire is that the poor,
for example, should rise above poverty and wretchedness, and should
better their condition in life; and for this it strives. By the
very fact that it calls men to virtue and forms them to its practice,
it promotes this in no slight degree. Christian morality, when it is
adequately and completely practised, conduces of itself to temporal
prosperity, for it merits the blessing of that God who is the source of
all blessings; it powerfully restrains the lust of possession and the lust
of pleasure-twin plagues, which too often make a man without self-
restraint miserable in the midst of abundance-(The root of all evils
is cupidity.-1 Tim. vi. 10)—it makes men supply by economy for
the want of means, teaching them to be constant with frugal living,
and keeping them out of the reach of those vices which eat up not
merely small incomes, but large fortunes, and dissipate many a good
inheritance,
31. Moreover, the Church intervenes directly in the interest of
the poor by setting on foot and keeping up many things which it
sees to be efficacious in the relief of poverty. Here again it has
always succeeded so well that it has even extorted the praise of its
enemies. Such was the ardour of brotherly love among the earliest
Christians, that numbers of those who were better off deprived
themselves of their possessions in order to relieve their brethren;
whence neither was there any one needy among them (Acts iv. 34).
To the order of Deacons, instituted for that very purpose, was com-
mitted by the Apostles the charge of the daily distributions; and
the Apostle Paul, though burdened with the solicitude of all the
churches, hesitated not to undertake laborious journeys in order to
carry the alms of the faithful to the poorer Christians. Tertullian
calls these contributions, given voluntarily by Christians in their
assemblies, deposits of piety; because, to cite his words, they were
employed in feeding the needy, in burying them, in the support of
boys and girls destitute of means and deprived of their parents, in the
care of the aged, and in the relief of the shipwrecked ("Apologia
Secunda," xxxix.).
M
178
APPENDIX.
32. Thus by degrees came into existence the patrimony which the
Church has guarded with religious care as the inheritance of the
poor. Nay, to spare them the shame of begging, the common
Mother of rich and poor has exerted herself to gather together funds
for the support of the needy. The Church has stirred up every-
where the heroism of charity, and has established congregations of
religious and many other useful institutions for help and mercy, so
that there might be hardly any kind of suffering which was not
visited and relieved. At the present day, there are many who, like
the heathen of old, blame and condemn the Church for this beauti-
ful charity. They would substitute in its place a system of State-
organised relief. But no human methods will ever supply for the
devotion and self-sacrifice of Christian charity. Charity, as a vir-
tue, belongs to the Church; for it is no virtue unless it is drawn
from the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ; and he who turns his back
on the Church cannot be near to Christ.
33. It cannot, however, be doubted that to attain the purpose of
which we treat, not only the Church, but all human means must
conspire. All who are concerned in the matter must be of one mind
and must act together. It is in this as in the Providence which
governs the world; results do not happen save where all the causes
co-operate.
THE STATE'S PART: IT NEEDS GOOD LAWS.
34. Let us now, therefore, inquire what part the State should play
in the work of remedy and relief.
35. By the State we here understand, not the particular form of
government which prevails in this or that nation, but the State as
rightly understood that is to say, any government conformable in
its institutions to right reason and natural law, and to those dictates
of the Divine wisdom which we have expounded in the Encyclical
on the Christian Constitution of the State. The first duty, there-
fore, of the rulers of the State should be to make sure that the laws
and institutions, the general character and administration of the
commonwealth, shall be such as to produce of themselves public
well-being and private prosperity. This is the proper office of wise
statesmanship and the work of the heads of the State. Now, a State
chiefly prospers and flourishes by morality, by well-regulated family
life, by respect for religion and justice, by the moderation and equal
distribution of public burdens, by the progress of the arts and of
trade, by the abundant yield of the land-by everything which
APPENDIX.
179
makes the citizens better and happier. Here, then, it is in the
power of a ruler to benefit every order of the State, and, amongst
the rest, to promote in the highest degree the interests of the poor;
and this by virtue of his office, and without being exposed to any
suspicion of undue interference-for it is the province of the com-
monwealth to consult for the common good. And the more that is
done for the working population by the general laws of the country,
the less need will there be to seek for particular means to relieve
them.
THE LAWS MUST APPLY EQUALLY TO ALL.
36. There is another and a deeper consideration which must not be
lost sight of. To the State the interests of all are equal, whether
high or low. The poor are members of the national community
equally with the rich; they are real component parts, living parts,
which make up, through the family, the living body; and it need
hardly be said that they are by far the majority. It would be irra-
tional to neglect one portion of the citizens and to favour another;
and, therefore, the public administration must duly and solicitously
provide for the welfare and the comfort of the working people, or
else that law of justice will be violated which ordains that each shall
have his due. To cite the wise words of St. Thomas of Aquin :
As the part and the whole are in a certain sense identical, the part may
in some sense claim what belongs to the whole (2a 2æ Q. lxi. Art. 1 ad
2). Among the many and grave duties of rulers, who would do their
best for the people, the first and chief is to act with strict justice-
with that justice which is called in the schools distributive-towards
each and every class.
THE GOVERNMENT HAS DUTIES TO THE COMMUNITY.
37. But although all citizens, without exception, can and ought to
contribute to that common good in which individuals share so pro-
fitably to themselves, yet it is not to be supposed that all can con-
tribute in the same way and to the same extent. No matter what
changes may be made in forms of government, there will always be
differences and inequalities of condition in the State; society cannot
exist or be conceived without them. Some there must be who
dedicate themselves to the work of the commonwealth, who make
the laws, who administer justice, whose advice and authority govern
the nation in times of peace, and defend it in war. Such men clearly
occupy the foremost place in the State, and should be held in the
foremost estimation, for their work touches most nearly and effec-
180
APPENDIX.
tively the general interests of the community. Those who labour at
a trade or calling do not promote the general welfare in such a
fashion as this; but they do, in the most important way, benefit the
nation, though less directly. We have insisted that, since it is the
end of society to make men better, the chief good that society can
be possessed of is virtue. Nevertheless, in all well-constituted
States, it is by no means an unimportant matter to provide those
bodily and external commodities, the use of which is necessary to
virtuous action (St. Thomas of Aquin. De Regimine Principum,
I. cap. 15). And in the provision of material well-being, the labour
of the poor-the exercise of their skill and the employment of their
strength in the culture of the land and the workshops of trade-is
most efficacious and altogether indispensable. Indeed, their co-
operation in this respect is so important that, it may be truly said,
it is only by the labour of the working-man that States grow
rich. Justice, therefore, demands that the interests of the poorer
population be carefully watched over by the Administration, so that
they who contribute so largely to the advantage of the community
may themselves share in the benefits they create-that being housed,
clothed, and enabled to support life, they may find their existence
less hard and more endurable. It follows that whatever shall ap-
pear to be conducive to the well-being of those who work, should
receive favourable consideration. Let it not be feared that solicitude
of this kind will injure any interest; on the contrary, it will be to
the advantage of all; for it cannot but be good for the common-
wealth to secure from misery those on whom it so largely depends.
38. We have said that the State must not absorb the individual'
or the family; both should be allowed free and untrammelled action
as far as is consistent with the common good and the interests of
others. Nevertheless, rulers should anxiously safe-guard the com-
munity and all its parts; the community, because the conservation
of the community is so emphatically the business of the supreme
power, that the safety of the commonwealth is not only the first
law, but it is a Government's whole reason of existence; and the
parts, because both philosophy and the Gospel agree in laying down
that the object of the administration of the State should be, not the
advantage of the ruler, but the benefit of those over whom he rules.
The gift of authority is from God, and is, as it were, a participation
of the highest of all sovereignties; and it should be exercised as the
power of God is exercised-with a fatherly solicitude which not only
guides the whole, but reaches to details as well,
APPENDIX.
181
DUTIES OF THE GOVERNMENT.
39. Whenever the general interest or any particular class suffers,
or is threatened with evils which can in no other way be met, the
public authority must step in to meet them. Now, among the in-
terests of the public, as of private individuals, are these: that
peace and good order should be maintained; that family life should
be carried on in accordance with God's laws and those of nature;
that religion should be reverenced and obeyed; that a high standard.
of morality should prevail in public and private life; that the sanc-
tity of justice should be respected, and that no one should injure
another with impunity; that the members of the commonwealth
should grow up to man's estate strong and robust, and capable, if
need be, of guarding and defending their country. If by a strike,
or other combination of workmen, there should be imminent danger
of disturbance to the public peace; or if circumstances were such
that among the labouring population the ties of family life were re-
laxed; if religion were found to suffer through the workmen not
having time and opportunity to practise it; if in workshops and
factories there were danger to morals through the mixing of the
sexes, or from any occasion of evil; or if employers laid burdens
upon the workmen which were unjust, or degraded them with con-
ditions that were repugnant to their dignity as human beings;
finally, if health were endangered by excessive labour, or by work
unsuited to sex or age-in these cases, there can be no question
that, within certain limits, it would be right to call in the help
and authority of the law. The limits must be determined by the
nature of the occasion which calls for the law's interference-the
principle being this, that the law must not undertake more, or go
further, than is required for the remedy of the evil or the removal
of the danger.
40. Rights must be religiously respected wherever they are found;
and it is the duty of the public authority to prevent and punish in-
jury, and to protect each one in the possession of his own. Still,
when there is question of protecting the rights of individuals, the
poor and helpless have a claim to special consideration. The richer
population have many ways of protecting themselves, and stand less
in need of help from the State; those who are badly off have no re-
sources of their own to fall back upon, and must chiefly rely upon
the assistance of the State. And it is for this reason that wage-
earners, who are undoubtedly among the weak and necessitous,
should be specially cared for and protected by the commonwealth.
182
APPENDIX.
41. Here, however, it will be advisable to advert expressly to one
or two of the more important details. It must be borne in mind.
that the chief thing to be secured is the safe-guarding, by legal en-
actment and policy, of private property. Most of all is it essential
in these times of covetous greed to keep the multitude within the
line of duty; for if all may justly strive to better their condition,
yet neither justice nor the common good allows any one to seize
that which belongs to another, or, under the pretext of futile and
ridiculous equality, to lay hands on other people's fortunes. It is
most true that by far the larger part of the people who work prefer
to improve themselves by honest labour rather than by doing wrong
to others. But there are not a few who are imbued with bad prin-
ciples and are anxious for revolutionary change, and whose great
purpose it is to stir up tumult and bring about a policy of violence.
The authority of the State should intervene to put restraint upon
these disturbers, to save the workmen from their seditious arts, and
to protect lawful owners from spoliation.
STRIKES AND THE RIGHTS OF EMPLOYERS.
42. When work-people have recourse to a strike, it is frequently
because the hours of labour are too long, or the work too hard, or
because they consider their wages insufficient. The grave incon-
venience of this not uncommon occurrence should be obviated by
public remedial measures; for such paralysis of labour not only
affects the masters and their work-people, but is extremely injuri-
ous to trade and to the general interests of the public; moreover, on
such occasions, violence and disorder are generally not far off, and
thus it frequently happens that the public peace is threatened. The
laws should be beforehand, and prevent these troubles from arising;
they should lend their influence and authority to the removal in
good time of the causes which lead to conflicts between masters and
those whom they employ.
STRIKES AND THE RIGHTS OF WORKMEN.
43. But if the owners of property inust be made secure, the work-
man, too, has property and possessions in which he must be pro-
tected; and, first of all, there are his spiritual and mental interests.
Life on earth, however good and desirable in itself, is not the final
purpose for which man is created; it is only the way and the means
to that attainment of truth, and that practice of goodness, in which
APPENDIX.
183
the full life of the soul consists. It is the soul which is made after
the image and likeness of God; it is in the soul that sovereignty
resides, in virtue of which man is commanded to rule the creatures
below him, and to use all the earth and the ocean for his profit and
advantage. Fill the earth and subdue it; and rule over the fishes of
the sea, and the fowls of the air, and all living creatures which move
upon the earth (Genesis i. 28). In this respect all men are equal;
there is no difference between rich and poor, master and servant,
ruler and ruled, for the same is Lord over all (Romans x. 12). No
man may outrage with impunity that human dignity which God
Himself treats with reverence, nor stand in the way of that higher
life which is the preparation for the eternal life of Heaven. Nay,
more; a man has here no power over himself. To consent to any
treatment which is calculated to defeat the end and purpose of his
being is beyond his right; he cannot give up his soul to servitude;
for it is not man's own rights which are here in question, but the
rights of God, most sacred and inviolable.
RIGHTS OF WORKMEN: (a) SUNDAY REST.
44. From this follows the obligation of the cessation of work and
labour on Sundays and certain festivals. This rest from labour is
not to be understood as mere idleness; much less must it be an
occasion of spending money and of vicious excess, as many would
desire it to be; but it should be rest from labour consecrated by re-
ligion. Repose united with religious observance disposes man to
forget for a while the business of this daily life, and to turn his
thoughts to heavenly things, and to the worship which he so strictly
owes to the Eternal Deity. It is this, above all, which is the
reason and motive of the Sunday rest; a rest sanctioned by God's
great law of the ancient covenant, Remember thou keep holy the
Sabbath Day (Exod. xx. 8), and taught to the world by His own
mysterious "rest" after the creation of man: He rested on the seventh
day from all His work which He had done (Genesis ii. 2).
(b) HOURS OF LABOUR-GRINDING EMPLOYERS—DISTRIBUTION
OF WORK.
45. If we turn now to things exterior and corporeal, the first con-
cern of all is to save the poor workers from the cruelty of grasping
speculators, who use human beings as mere iustruments for making
money. It is neither justice nor humanity so to grind men down
with excessive labour, as to stupefy their minds and wear out their
184
APPENDIX.
bodies. Man's powers, like his general nature, are limited, and
beyond these limits he cannot go. His strength is developed and
increased by use and exercise, but only on condition of due inter-
mission and proper rest. Daily labour, therefore, must be so regu-
lated that it may not be protracted during longer hours than strength
admits. How many and how long the intervals of rest should be
will depend on the nature of the work, on circumstances of time and
place, and on the health and strength of the workman, Those who
labour in mines and quarries, and in work within the bowels of the
earth, should have shorter hours in proportion as their labour is
more severe and more trying to health. Then again, the season of
the year must be taken into account; for not unfrequently a kind of
labour is easy at one time which at another is intolerable or very
difficult. Finally, work which is suitable for a strong man cannot
reasonably be required from a woman or a child. And, in regard
to children, great care should be taken not to place them in work-
shops and factories until their bodies and minds are sufficiently
mature. For just as rough weather destroys the buds of spring, so
too early an experience of life's hard work blights the young promise
of a child's powers, and makes any real education impossible.
Women, again, are not suited to certain trades; for a woman is by
nature fitted for home-work, and it is that which is best adapted at
once to preserve her modesty and to promote the good bringing-up
of children and the well-being of the family. As a general principle,
it may be laid down that a workman ought to have leisure and rest
in proportion to the wear and tear of his strength; for the waste of
strength must be repaired by the cessation of work.
46. In all agreements between masters and work people there is
always the condition expressed or understood, that there be allowed
proper rest for soul and body. To agree in any other sense would
be against what is right and just; for it can never be right or just
to require on the one side, or to promise on the other, the giving up
of those duties which a man owes to his God and to himself.
THE WAGES QUESTION.
47. We now approach a subject of very great importance, and one
on which, if extremes are to be avoided, right ideas are absolutely
necessary. Wages, we are told, are fixed by free consent; and,
therefore, the employer, when he pays what was agreed upon, has
done his part and is not called upon for any thing further. The
only way, it is said, in which injustice could happen would be if the
APPENDIX.
185
1
master refused to pay the whole of the wages, or the workman
would not complete the work undertaken; when this happens the
State should intervene, to see that each obtains his own-but not
under any other circumstances.
THE WORKMAN'S RIGHT TO FAIR WAGES.
48. This mode of reasoning is by no means convincing to a fair-
minded man, for there are important considerations which it leaves
out of view altogether. To labour is to exert one's self for the sake
of procuring what is necessary for the purposes of life and most of
all for self-preservation. In the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat
bread (Genesis iii. 19). Therefore a man's labour has two notes or
characters. First of all, it is personal; for the exertion of indi-
vidual power belongs to the individual who puts it forth, employing
this power for that personal profit for which it was given. Secondly,
man's labour is necessary; for without the result of labour a man
cannot live; and self-conservation is a law of Nature, which it is
wrong to disobey. Now, if we were to consider labour merely so far as
it is personal, doubtless it would be within the workman's right to
accept any rate of wages whatever; for in the same way as he is free
to work or not, so he is free to accept a small remuneration or even
none at all.
But this is a mere abstract supposition; the labour of
the working-man is not only his personal attribute, but it is ncces-
sary; and this makes all the difference. The preservation of life is
the bounden duty of each and all, and to fail therein is a crime. It
follows that each one has a right to procure what is required in
order to live; and the poor can procure it in no other way than by
work and wages.
THIS RIGHT MORE IMPERIOUS THAN CONTRACT.
49. Let it be granted, then, that as a rule, workman and em-
ployer should make free agreements, and in particular should freely
agree as to wages; nevertheless, there is a dictate of Nature more
imperious and more ancient than any bargain between man and man,
that the remuneration must be enough to support the wage-earner
in reasonable and frugal comfort. If through necessity or fear of a
worse evil, the workman accepts harder conditions because an em-
ployer or a contractor will give him no better, he is the victim of
force and injustice. In these and similar questions, however—such
as, for example, the hours of labour in different trades, the sanitary
precautions to be observed in factories and workshops, etc.-in order
186
APPENDIX.
to supersede undue interference on the part of the State, especially
as circumstances, times and localities differ so widely, it is advisable
that recourse be had to Societies or Boards, such as we shall men-
tion presently, or to some other method of safe-guarding the interests
of the wage-earners; the State to be asked for approval and pro-
tection.
THE ADVANTAGES OF PEASANT PROPRIETORSHIP.
50. If a workman's wages be sufficient to cnable him to maintain
himself, his wife, and his children in reasonable comfort, he will not
find it difficult, if he is a sensible man, to study economy; and he
will not fail, by cutting down expenses, to put by a little property;
nature and reason would urge him to do this. We have seen that
this great labour question cannot be solved except by assuming as
a principle that private ownership must be held sacred and inviol-
able. The law, therefore, should favour ownership, and its policy
should be to induce as many of the people as possible to become
owners.
51. Many excellent results will follow from this; and, first of all,
property will certainly become more equitably divided. For the
effect of civil change and revolution has been to divide society into
two widely different castes. On the one side there is the party
which holds the power because it holds the wealth; which has in its
grasp all labour and all trade, which manipulates for its own bene-
fit and its own purposes all the sources of supply, and which is
powerfully represented in the councils of the State itself. On the
other side there is the needy and powerless multitude, sore and
suffering, and always ready for disturbance. If working people can
be encouraged to look forward to obtaining a share in the land, the
result will be that the gulf between vast wealth and deep poverty
will be bridged over, and the two orders will be brought nearer to-
gether. Another consequence will be the greater abundance of the
fruits of the earth. Men always work harder and more readily when
they work on that which is their own; nay, they learn to love the
very soil which yields in response to the labour of their hands, not
only food to eat, but an abundance of good things for themselves
and those that are dear to them. It is evident how such a spirit of
willing labour would add to the produce of the earth and to the
wealth of the community. And a third advantage would arise from
this men would cling to the country in which they were born; for
no one would exchange his country for a foreign land if his own
APPENDIX.
187
These
afforded him the means of living a tolerable and happy life.
three important benefits, however, can only be expected on the con-
dition that a man's means be not drained and exhausted by excessive.
taxation. The right to possess private property is from Nature, not
from man; and the State has only the right to regulate its use in
the interests of the public good, but by no means to abolish it alto-
gether. The State is, therefore, unjust and cruel if, in the name of
taxation, it deprives the private owner of more than is just.
WORKMEN'S UNIONS: THEIR ADVANTAGES.
52. In the last place-employers and workmen may themselves
effect much in the matter of which we treat, by means of those in-
stitutions and organisations which afford opportune assistance to
those in need, and which draw the two orders more closely together.
Among these may be enumerated: societies for mutual help; vari-
ous foundations established by private persons for providing for the
workman, and for the widow or his orphans, in sudden calamity,
in sickness, and in the event of death; and what are called "pat-
ronages" or institutions for the care of boys and girls, for young
people, and also for those of more mature age.
53. The most important of all are Workmen's Associations; for
these virtually include all the rest. History attests what excellent
results were effected by the Artificers' Guilds of a former day.
They were the means not only of many advantages to the workmen,
but in no small degree of the advancement of art, as numerous
monuments remain to prove. Such associations should be adapted
to the requirements of the age in which we live-an age of greater
instruction, of different customs, and of more numerous require-
ments in daily life. It is gratifying to know that there are actually
in existence not a few societies of this nature, consisting either of
workmen alone, or of workmen and employers together; but it were
greatly to be desired that they should multiply and become more
effective. We have spoken of them more than once; but it will be
well to explain here how much they are needed, to show that they
exist by their own right, and to enter into their organisation and
their work.
54. The experience of his own weakness urges man to call in
help from without. We read in the pages of Holy Writ: It is
be together than one; for they have the advan-
If one fall he shall be supported by the other.
Woe to him that is alone, for when he falleth he hath none to lift him
better that two should
tage of their society.
188
APPENDIX.
up (Ecclesiastes, iv. 9, 10). And further: A brother that is helped
by his brother is like a strong city (Proverbs xviii. 19). It is this
natural impulse which unites men in civil society; and it is this also
which makes them band themselves together in associations of
citizen with citizen; associations which, it is true, cannot be called
societies in the complete sense of the word, but which are societies
nevertheless.
is
55. These lesser societies, and the society which constitutes the
State, differ in many things, because their immediate purpose and
end is different. Civil society exists for the common good, and,
therefore, is concerned with the interests of all in general, and with
individual interests in their due place and proportion. Hence, it is
called public society, because by its means, as St. Thomas of Aquin
says, Men communicate with one another in the setting up of a
commonwealth (contra impugnantes Dei cultum et religionem, Cap.
II.). But the societies which are formed in the bosom of the State
are called private, and justly so, because their immediate purpose
the private advantage of the associates. Now a private society, says
St. Thomas again, is one which is formed for the purpose of carrying
out private business; as when two or three enter into a partnership
with the view of trading in conjunction (Ibid). Particular societies,
then, although they exist within the State, and are each a part of
the State, nevertheless cannot be prohibited by the State absolutely
and as such. For to enter into "society" of this kind is the natural
right of man; and the State must protect natural rights, not de-
stroy them; and if it forbids its citizens to form associations, it
contradicts the very principle of its own existence; for both they
and it exist in virtue of the same principle-viz. the natural pro.
pensity of man to live in society.
UNJUST UNIONS.
56. There are times, no doubt, when it is right that the law
should interfere to prevent association; as when men join together
for purposes which are evidently bad, unjust, or dangerous to the
State. In such cases the public authority may justly forbid the
formation of associations, and may dissolve them when they already
exist. But every precaution should be taken not to violate the
rights of individuals, and not to make unreasonable regulations
under the pretence of public benefit. For laws only bind when they
are in accordance with right reason, and, therefore, with the eternal
law of God (Human law is law only in virtue of its accordance with
APPENDIX.
189
right reason: and thus it is manifest that it flows from the eternal law,
And in so far as it deviates from right reason it is called an unjust
law; in such case it is not law at all, but rather a species of violence.
-St. Thomas of Aquin, Summa Theologica, la 2æ Q. xciii. Art iii.).
ECCLESIASTICAL ANALOGIES.
57. And here we are reminded of the confraternities, societies,
and religious orders, which have arisen by the Church's authority
and the piety of the Christian people. The annals of every nation
down to our own times testify to what they have done for the human
race. It is indisputable, on grounds of reason alone, that such
associations, being perfectly blameless in their objects, have the
sanction of the law of Nature. On their religious side, they rightly
claim to be responsible to the Church alone. The administrators of
the State, therefore, have no rights over them, nor can they claim.
any share in their management; on the contrary, it is the State's
duty to respect and cherish them, and, if necessary, to defend them
from attack. It is notorious that a very different course has been
followed, more especially in our own times. In many places the
State has laid violent hands on these communities, and committed
manifold injustice against them; it has placed them under the civil
law, taken away their rights as corporate bodies, and robbed them
of their property. In such property the Church had her rights,
each member of the body had his or her rights, and there were also
the rights of those who had founded or endowed them for a definite
purpose, and of those for whose benefit and assistance they existed.
Wherefore, we cannot refrain from complaining of such spoliation as
unjust and fraught with evil results; and with the more reason, be-
cause, at the very time when the law proclaims that association is
free to all, we see that Catholic societies, however peaceable and
useful, are hindered in every way, whilst the utmost freedom is
given to men whose objects are at once hurtful to Religion and
dangerous to the State.
THE DANGER OF UNCHRISTIAN ASSOCIATIONS.
58. Associations of every kind, and especially those of working-
men, are now far more common than formerly. In regard to many
of these, there is no need at present to inquire whence they spring,
what are their objects, or what means they use. But there is a
good deal of evidence which goes to prove that many of these
societies are in the hands of invisible leaders, and are managed on
190
APPENDIX.
principles far from compatible with Christianity and the public
well-being; and that they do their best to get into their hands the
whole field of labour, and to force workmen either to join them or to
starve. Under these circumstances Christian workmen must do one
of two things; either join associations in which their religion will
be exposed to peril, or form associations among themselves-unite
their forces and courageously shake off the yoke of an unjust and
intolerable oppression. No one who does not wish to expose man's
chief good to extreme danger will hesitate to say that the second
alternative must by all means be adopted.
PRAISE TO CATHOLIC PHILANTHROPISTS.
59. Those Catholics are worthy of all praise-and there are not a
few-who, understanding what, the times require, have, by various
enterprises and experiments, endeavoured to better the condition
of the working people without any sacrifice of principle. They
have taken up the cause of the working-man, and have striven to
make both families and individuals better off; to infuse the spirit of
justice into the mutual relations of employer and employed; to keep
before the eyes of both classes the precepts of duty and the laws of
the Gospel-that Gospel which, by inculcating self-restraint, keeps
men within the bounds of moderation, and tends to establish har-
mony among the divergent interests and various classes which
It is with such ends in view that we see men
compose the State.
of eminence meeting together for discussion, for the promotion of
united action, and for practical work. Others, again, strive to unite
working people of various kinds into associations, help them with
their advice and their means, and enable them to obtain honest and
profitable work. The bishops, on their part, bestow their ready
goodwill and support; and with their approval and guidance many
members of the clergy, both secular and regular, labour assiduously
on behalf of the spiritual and mental interests of the members of
associations. And there are not wanting Catholics possessed of
affluence, who have, as it were, cast in their lot with the wage- !
earners, and who have spent large sums in founding and widely
spreading Benefit and Insurance Societies, by means of which the
working man may, without difficulty, acquire by his labour, not only
many present advantages, but also the certainty of honourable sup-
port in time to come. How much this multiplied and earnest
activity has benefited the community at large is too well known to
require us to dwell upon it. We find in it the grounds of the most
APPENDIX.
191
cheering hope for the future; provided that the associations we
have described continue to grow and spread, and are well and wisely
administered. Let the State watch over these societies of citizens
united together in the exercise of their right; but let it not thrust
itself into their peculiar concerns and their organisation; for things
move and live by the soul within them, and they may be killed by
the grasp of a hand from without.
THE RULES OF UNIONS.
60. In order that an association may be carried on with unity of
purpose and harmony of action, its organisation and government
must be firm and wise. All such societies, being free to exist,
have the further right to adopt such rules and organisation as may
best conduce to the attainment of their objects. We do not deem it
possible to enter into definite details on the subject of organisation ;
this must depend on national character, on practice and experience,
on the nature and scope of the work to be done, on the magnitude
of the various trades and employments, and on other circumstances
of fact and of time-all of which must be carefully weighed.
(1) THEY SHOULD BE FOUNDED ON RELIGION.
61. Speaking summarily, we may lay it down as a general and
perpetual law that Workmen's Associations should be so organised
and governed as to furnish the best and most suitable means for
attaining what is aimed at-that is to say, for helping each indi-
vidual member to better his condition to the utmost in body, mind,
and property. It is clear that they must pay special and principal
attention to piety and morality, and that their internal discipline
must be directed precisely by these considerations; otherwise they
entirely lose their special character, and come to be very little better
than those societies which take no account of religion at all. What
advantage can it be to a workman to obtain, by means of a society,
all that he requires, and to endanger his soul for want of spiritual
food? What doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer
the loss of his own soul? (St. Matthew xvi. 26). This, as our Lord
teaches, is the note or character that distinguishes the Christian
from the heathen. After all these things do the heathens seek
Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His justice, and all these things
shall be added unto you (St. Matthew vi. 32, 33). Let our associa-
tions, then, look first and before all to God; let religious instruction
have therein a foremost place, each one being carefully taught what
192
APPENDIX.
is his duty to God, what to believe, what to hope for, and how to
work out his salvation; and let all be warned and fortified with
especial solicitude against wrong opinions and false teaching. Let
the working-man be urged and led to the worship of God, to the
earnest practice of religion, and, among other things, to the sancti-
fication of Sundays and festivals. Let him learn to reverence and
love Holy Church, the common Mother of us all; and so to obey
the precepts, and to frequent the Sacraments of the Church, those
Sacraments being the means ordained by God for obtaining forgive-
ness of sin and for leading a holy life.
(2) THEIR AIM SHOULD BE MUTUAL CONCORD.
62. The foundations of the organisation being laid in Religion,
we next go on to determine the relations of the members one to
another, in order that they may live together in concord and go on
prosperously and successfully. The offices and charges of the
society should be distributed for the good of the society itself, and
in such manner that difference in degree or position should not
interfere with unanimity and goodwill. Office-bearers should be
appointed with prudence and discretion, and each one's charge
should be carefully marked out; thus no member will suffer wrong.
Let the common funds be administered with the strictest honesty
in such way that a member receive assistance in proportion to his
necessities. The rights and duties of employers should be the sub-
ject of careful consideration as compared with the rights and duties
of the employed. If it should happen that either a master or a
workman deemed himself injured, nothing would be more desirable
than that there should be a committee composed of honest and
capable men of the association itself, whose duty it should be, by
the laws of the association, to decide the dispute. Among the pur
poses of a society should be to try to arrange for a continuous
supply of work at all times and seasons; and to create a fund from
which the members may be helped in their necessities, not only
in cases of accident, but also in sickness, old age, and misfortune.
(3) THEIR RESULT: THE WELL-BEING OF THE POOR.
63. Such rules and regulations, if obeyed willingly by all, will
sufficiently ensure the well-being of poor people; whilst such
mutual associations among Catholics are certain to be productive,
in no small degree, of prosperity to the State. It is not rash to
conjecture the future from the past. Age gives way to age, but thẹ
APPENDIX.
193
events of one century are wonderfully like those of another; for
they are directed by the Providence of God, who overrules the
course of history in accordance with His purposes in creating the
race of man. We are told that it was cast as a reproach on the
Christians of the early ages of the Church that the greater number
of them had to live by begging or by labour. Yet, destitute as they
were of wealth and influence, they ended by winning over to their
side the favour of the rich and the goodwill of the powerful. They
showed themselves industrious, laborious, and peaceful, men of
justice, and, above all, men of brotherly love. In the presence of
such a life and such an example, prejudice disappeared, the tongue
of malevolence was silenced, and the lying traditions of ancient
superstition yielded little by little to Christian truth.
64. At this moment the condition of the working population is
the question of the hour; and nothing can be of higher interest to
all classes of the State than that it should be rightly and reasonably
decided. But it will be easy for Christian working-men to decide it
aright if they form associations, choose wise guides, and follow the
same path which with so much advantage to themselves and the
commonwealth was trod by their fathers before them. Prejudice, it
is true, is mighty, and so is the love of money; but if the sense of
what is just and right be not destroyed by depravity of heart, their
fellow-citizens are sure to be won over to a kindly feeling towards
men whom they see to be so industrious and so modest, who so un-
mistakably prefer honesty to lucre, and the sacredness of duty to
all other considerations.
65. And another great advantage would result from the state of
things we are describing; there would be so much more hope and
possibility of recalling to a sense of their duty those working-men
who have either given up their faith altogether, or whose lives are
at variance with its precepts. These men, in most cases, feel that
they have been fooled by empty promises and deceived by false
appearances. They cannot but perceive that their grasping em-
ployers too often treat them with the greatest inhumanity and
hardly care for them beyond the profit their labour brings; and if
they belong to an association, it is probably one in which there
exists, in place of charity and love, that intestine strife which
always accompanies unresigned and irreligious poverty. Broken in
spirit and worn down in body, how many of them would gladly free
themselves from this galling slavery! But human respect, or the
dread of starvation, makes them afraid to take the step. To such
N
194
APPENDIX.
as these, Catholic associations are of incalculable service, helping
them out of their difficulties, inviting them to companionship, and
receiving the repentant to a shelter in which they may securely
trust.
CONCLUSION: LET ALL WORK TOGETHER.
66. We have now laid before you, venerable brethren, who are
the persons, and what are the means, by which this most difficult
question must be solved. Every one must put his hand to the work
which falls to his share, and that at once and immediately, lest the
evil which is already so great may by delay become absolutely be-
yond remedy. Those who rule the State must use the law and the
institutions of the country; masters and rich men must remember
their duty; the poor, whose interests are at stake, must make every
lawful and proper effort; and since Religion alone, as we said at
the beginning, can destroy the evil at its root, all men must be per-
suaded that the primary thing needful is to return to real Chris-
tianity, in the absence of which all the plans and devices of the
wisest will be of little avail.
THE EXAMPLE OF THE CHURCH.
67. As far as regards the Church, its assistance will never be
wanting, be the time or the occasion what it may; and it will inter-
vene with the greater effect in proportion as its liberty of action is
the more unfettered: let this be carefully noted by those whose
office it is to provide for the public welfare. Every minister of holy.
Religion must throw into the conflict all the energy of his mind and
all the strength' of his endurance; with your authority, venerable
brethren, and by your example, they must never cease to urge upon
all men of every class, upon the high as well as the lowly, the Gospel
doctrines of Christian life; by every means in their power they
must strive for the good of the people; and, above all, they
must earnestly cherish in themselves, and try to arouse in others,
Charity, the mistress and queen of virtues. For the happy results
we all long for must be chiefly brought about by the plenteous out-
pouring of Charity; of that true Christian Charity which is the ful-
filling of the whole Gospel law, which is always ready to sacrifice
itself for others' sake, and which is man's surest antidote against
worldly pride and immoderate love of self; that Charity, whose
office is described and whose Godlike features are drawn by the
Apostle St. Paul in these words: Charity is patient, is kind.
APPENDIX.
195
seeketh not her own.
(1 Corinthians xiii. 4-7).
•
suffereth all things. . . endureth all things
68. On each one of you, venerable brethren, and on your clergy
and people, as an earnest of God's mercy and a mark of our affection,
we lovingly in the Lord bestow the Apostolic Benediction.
Given at St. Peter's, in Rome, the fifteenth day of May, 1891, the
fourteenth year of our Pontificate.
LEO XIII., POPE.
Printed by Cowan & Co., Limited, Perth.
OPINIONS OF THE PRESS
ON THE
SOCIAL SCIENCE SERIES.
"
The Principles of State Interference' is another of Messrs. Swan Sonnen-
schein's Series of Handbooks on Scientific Social Subjects. It would be
fitting to close our remarks on this little work with 2 word of com-
mendation of the publishers of so many useful volumes by eminent
writers on questions of pressing interest to a large number of the com-
munity. We have now received and read a good number of the handbooks
which Messrs. Swan Sonnenschein have published in this series, and can
speak in the highest terms of them. They are written by men of con-
siderable knowledge of the subjects they have undertaken to discuss; they
are concise; they give a fair estimate of the progress which recent dis-
cussion has added towards the solution of the pressing social questions
of to-day, are well up to date, and are published at a price within the
resources of the public to which they are likely to be of the most use."—
Westminster Review, July, 1891.
$
"The excellent Social Science Series,' which is published at as low a price
as to place it within everybody's reach."-Review of Reviews.
44
'A most useful series.
•
•
This impartial series welcomes both just writers
and unjust.”—Manchester Guardian.
"The Social Science Series' is doubtless doing useful service in calling atten-
tion to certain special needs and defects of the body politic, and pointing
out the way to improvement and reform."-Bookseller.
"Convenient, well-printed, and moderately-priced volumes."-Reynold's News-
paper.
There is a certain impartiality about the attractive and well-printed volumes
which form the series to which the works noticed in this article belong.
There is no editor and no common design beyond a desire to redress those
errors and irregularities of society which all the writers, though they may
agree in little else, concur in acknowledging and deploring. The system
adopted appears to be to select men known to have a claim to speak with
more or less authority upon the shortcomings of civilisation, and to allow
each to propound the views which commend themselves most strongly to
his mind, without reference to the possible flat contradiction which may
be forthcoming at the hands of the next contributor."-Literary World.
The Social Science Series' aims at the illustration of all sides of social anl
economic truth and error."-Scotsman.
SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO.,
CO., LONDON.
SOCIAL SCIENCE SERIES.
SCARLET CLOTH, EACH 2s. 6d.
1. Work and Wages.
Prof. J. E. THOROLD ROGERS.
"Nothing that Professor Rogers writes can fail to be of interest to thoughtful
people."-Athenæum.
2. Civilisation: its Cause and Cure.
EDWARD CARPENTER.
"No passing piece of polemics, but a permanent possession."-Scottish Review.
3. Quintessence of Socialism.
Dr. SCHÄFFLE.
"Precisely the manual needed. Brief, lucid, fair and wise."-British Weekly.
4. Darwinism and Politics.
D. G. RITCHIE, M.A. (Oxon.).
New Edition, with two additional Essays on HUMAN EVOLUTION.
"One of the most suggestive books we have met with."-Literary World.
5. Religion of Socialism.
6. Ethics of Socialism.
E. BELFORT BAX.
E. BELFORT BAX.
"Mr. Bax is by far the ablest of the English exponents of Socialism."-Westminster
Review.
7. The Drink Question.
"Plenty of interesting matter for reflection. '-Graphic.
8. Promotion of General Happiness.
Dr. KATE MITCHELL.
Prof. M. MACMILLAN.
EDWARD CARPENTER.
A reasoned account of the most advanced and most enlightened utilitarian doc-
trine in a clear and readable form.”—Scotsman.
9. England's Ideal, &c.
"The literary power is unmistakable, their freshness of style, their humour, and
their enthusiasm."-Pall Mall Gazette.
10. Socialism in England.
SIDNEY WEBB, LL.B.
"The best general view of the subject from the modern Socialist side."-Athenæum.
11. Prince Bismarck and State Socialism.
W. H. DAWSON.
"A succinct, well-digested review of German social and economic legislation since
1870."-Saturday Review.
12. Godwin's Political Justice (On Property).
Edited by H. S. SALT.
"Shows Godwin at his best; with an interesting and informing introduction."-
Glasgow Herald.
13. The Story of the French Revolution.
"A trustworthy outline."-Scotsman.
14. The Co-Operative Commonwealth.
E. BELFORT Bax.
LAURENCE GRONLUND.
An independent exposition of the Socialism of the Marx school."-Contemporary
Review.
15. Essays and Addresses.
BERNARD BOSANQUET, M.A. (Oxon.).
'Ought to be in the hands of every student of the Nineteenth Century spirit."-
Echo.
"No one can complain of not being able to understand what Mr. Bosanquet
means."-Pall Mall Gazette.
16. Charity Organisation.
C. S. LOCH, Secretary to Charity Organisation
Society.
"A perfect little manual."-Athenaeum.
"Deserves a wide circulation."-Scotsman.
17. Thoreau's Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers.
"An interesting collection of essays."-Literary World.
18. Self-Help a Hundred Years Ago.
Edited by H. S. SALT.
G. J. HOLYOAKE.
"Will be studied with much benefit by all who are interested in the amelioration
of the condition of the poor.”—Morning Post.
19. The New York State Reformatory at Elmira.
ALEXANDER WINTER.
With Preface by HAVELOCK ELLIS.
"A valuable contribution to the literature of penology."-Black and White.
SOCIAL SCIENCE SERIES-(Continued).
20. Common Sense about Women.
T. W. HIGGINSON.
"An admirable collection of papers, advocating in the most liberal spirit the
emancipation of women."-Woman's Herald.
21. The Unearned Increment.
"A concise but comprehensive volume."-Echo.
22. Our Destiny.
W. H. DAWSON,
LAURENCE GRONLUND.
"A very vigorous little book, dealing with the influence of Socialism on morals
and religion."-Daily Chronicle.
23. The Working-Class Movement in America.
Dr. EDWARD and E. MARX AVELING.
"Will give a good idea of the condition of the working classes in America, and of
the various organisations which they have formed."--Scots Leader.
24. Luxury.
Prof. EMILE DE LAVELEYE.
"An eloquent plea on moral and economical grounds for simplicity of life.”—
Academy.
25. The Land and the Labourers.
Rev. C. W. STUBBS, M.A.
"This admirable book should be circulated in every village in the country."-
Manchester Guardian.
26. The Evolution of Property.
PAUL LAFARGUE.
"Will prove interesting and profitable to all students of economic history."-
Scotsman.
27. Crime and its Causes.
W. DOUGLAS MORRISON.
"Can hardly fail to suggest to all readers several new and pregnant reflections on
the subject."— Anti-Jacobin.
28. Principles of State Interference.
D. G. RITCHIE, M. A.
"An interesting contribution to the controversy on the functions of the State.".
Glasgow Herald.
29. German Socialism and F. Lassalle.
W. H. DAWSON.
"As a biographical history of German Socialistic movements during this century
it may be accepted as complete."-British Weekly.
30. The Purse and the Conscience.
H. M. THOMPSON, B.A. (Cantab.).
"Shows common sense and fairness in his arguments."-Scotsman.
31. Origin of Property in Land. FUSTEL DE COULANGES. Edited, with an
Introductory Chapter on the English Manor, by Prof. W. J. ASHLEY, M. A.
"His views are clearly stated, and are worth reading."-Saturday Review.
32. The English Republic.
W. J. LINTON.
Edited by KINETON PARKES.
"Characterised by that vigorous intellectuality which has marked his long life of
literary and artistic activity."-Glasgow Herald.
33. The Co-Operative Movement.
BEATRICE POTTER.
"Without doubt the ablest and most philosophical analysis of the Co-Operative
Movement which has yet been produced."-Speaker.
34. Neighbourhood Guilds.
Dr. STANTON COIT.
"A most suggestive little book to anyone interested in the social question."-
Pall Mall Gazette.
85. Modern Humanists.
"C
J. M. ROBERTSON.
Mr. Robertson's style is excellent-nay, even brilliant-and his purely literary
criticisms bear the mark of much acumen."-Times.
36. Outlooks from the New Standpoint.
E. BELFORT BAX.
"Mr. Bax is a very acute and accomplished student of history and economics."
-Daily Chronicle.
37. Distributing Co-Operative Societies.
Dr. LUIGI PIZZAMIGLIO.
•
Edited by
F. J. SNELL.
"Dr. Pizzamiglio has gathered together and grouped a wide array of facts and
statistics, and they speak for themselves."-Speaker.
38. Collectivism and Socialism.
By A. NACQUET. Edited by W. HEAFORD.
An admirable criticism by a well-known French politician of the New Socialism
of Marx and Lassalle."—Daily Chronicle.
SOCIAL SCIENCE SERIES--(Continued).
89. The London Programme.
66
Brimful of excellent ideas."-Anti-Jacobin.
40. The Modern State.
SIDNEY WEBB, LL.B.
PAUL LEROY BEAULIEU.
"A nost interesting book; well worth a place in the library of every social
inquirer."-N.B. Economist.
41. The Condition of Labour.
HENRY GEORGE.
"Written with striking ability and sure to attract attention."-Newcastle Chronicle.
42. The Revolutionary Spirit preceding the French Revolution.
FELIX ROCQUAIN. With a Preface by Professor HUXLEY.
"The student of the French Revolution will find in it an excellent introduction to
the study of that catastrophe."- Scotsman.
43. The Student's Marx.
EDWARD AVELING, D. Sc.
"One of the most practically useful of any in the Series."-Glasgow Herald.
44. A Short History of Parliament.
B. C. SKOTTOWE, M.A. (Oxon.).
"Deals very carefully and completely with this side of constitutional history."-
Spectator.
45. Poverty: Its Genesis and Exodus.
J. G. GODARD.
"He states the problems with great force and clearness."-N. British Economist.
46. The Trade Policy of Imperial Federation.
MAURICE H. HERVEY.
"An interesting contribution to the discussion."-Publishers' Circular.
47. The Dawn of Radicalism.
J. BOWLES DALY, LL.D.
"Forms an admirable picture of an epoch more pregnant, perhaps, with political
instruction than any other in the world's history."-Daily Telegraph.
48. The Destitute Alien in Great Britain. ARNOLD WHITE; MONTAGUE CRACKAN-
THORPE, Q.C.; W. A. M'ARTHUR, M.P.; W. H. WILKINS, &C.
49. Illegitimacy and the Influence of Seasons on Conduct.
ALBERT LEFFINGWELL, M.D.
50. Commercial Panics of the Nineteenth Century.
DOUBLE VOLUMES, Each 3s. 6d.
1. Life of Robert Owen.
H. M. HYNDMAN.
LLOYD JONES.
"A worthy record of a life of noble activities."-Manchester Examiner.
2. The Impossibility of Social Democracy: a Second Part of "The Quintessence
of Socialism”
Dr. A. SCHÄFFLE,
3. The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. FREDERICK ENGELS.
4. The Elements of Social Economy.
IN PREPARATION-
Progress and Prospects of Political Economy.
Socialism: Scientific and Utopian.
The State and Pensions in Old Age.
University Extension,
The Elements of Socialism.
Communism and Anarchism.
Catholic Socialism.
The Effects of Machinery on Wages.
The Fallacy of Saving.
YVES GUYOT.
Prof. J. K. INGRAM.
FRED. Engels.
J. A. SPENDER and ARTHUR
ACLAND, M.P.
Dr. M. E. Sadler.
Prof. R. T. ELY.
R. W. BURNIE.
Dr. NITTI.
Prof. J. S. NICHOLSON,
JOHN M. ROBERTSON.
SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO.: LONDON.
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS: NEW
YORK.

BOUND
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
3 9015 06588 5850
DO NOT REMOVE
OR
MUTILATE CARDS