The Condition of Labor

An Open Letter to Pope Leo XIII

Henry George

New York, September 11, 1891

Edited by Gavin R. Putland
May 15, 2007

Editor's preface

Preamble

Fundamental Principles affecting Land and its Rent
Moral-philosophical foundations
Security of land tenure
Reconciling common ownership & private possession
The need for public revenue
Immorality of present methods of taxation
The proper and natural source of public revenue
Growth towards equality
Consequences of resisting natural law
Review of Certain Arguments in the Encyclical
Economics and Policies of Other Schools of Thought
Socialism vs. Anarchism
Socialism vs. the Single Tax
All-devouring rent
Artificial limitation of demand for labor
Analysis of the Practical Proposals in the Encyclical
Blinkered diagnosis
Socialistic remedies
Treating the symptom
Feeding the cause
Contradictions of trade unionism
Taking jobs from others
The Labor Question Resolved
Further false assumptions
Basic cause of inequality
Why Christ was a laborer
Inequality harms rich and poor
Futility of imposing on employers
Charity no substitute for justice
Moral contradictions in landed privilege
Christianity losing credibility
Concluding appeals

Endnotes

Acknowledgments

Revision history

Copyright

Editor's preface

I quote from the Pastoral Rule of Pope St. Gregory the Great (^†604), Book III, Chapter 21:

Those who neither desire what belongs to others nor bestow what is their own are to be admonished to consider carefully that the earth out of which they are taken is common to all men, and therefore brings forth nourishment for all in common. Vainly, then, do those suppose themselves innocent, who claim to their own private use the common gift of God; those who, in not imparting what they have received, walk in the midst of the slaughter of their neighbours; since they almost daily slay so many persons as there are dying poor whose subsidies they keep close in their own possession. For, when we administer necessaries of any kind to the indigent, we do not bestow our own, but render them what is theirs; we rather pay a debt of justice than accomplish works of mercy. Whence also the Truth himself, when speaking of the caution required in shelving mercy, says, "Take heed that ye do not your justice before men" (Matthew 6:1). The Psalmist also, in agreement with this sentence, says, "He hath dispersed, he hath given to the poor, his justice endureth for ever" (Psalm 112:9). For, having first mentioned bounty bestowed upon the poor, he would not call this mercy, but rather justice: for it is surely just that whosoever receive what is given by a common lord should use it in common. Hence also Solomon says, "Whoso is just will give and will not spare" (Proverbs 21:26).

They are to be admonished also anxiously to take note how of the fig-tree that had no fruit the rigorous husbandman complains that it even cumbers the ground. For a fig-tree without fruit cumbers the ground, when the soul of the niggardly keeps unprofitably what might have benefited many. A fig-tree without fruit cumbers the ground, when the fool keeps barren under the shade of sloth a place which another might have cultivated under the sun of good works.

Fast-forward thirteen centuries... I quote from The Life of Henry George, by his son, Henry George, Jr. (New York: Doubleday Page & Co., 1904), Third Period, Chapter XIII:

[I]n the spring of 1891... Pope Leo XIII entered the controversy on the land question, addressing an encyclical letter "to our venerable brethren, all patriarchs, primates, archbishops, and bishops of the Catholic world". The encyclical was on "The Condition of Labor", and while there was a confusion of socialism and anarchism with the single tax, and neither Henry George nor the single tax proposition were specifically named, yet Archbishop Corrigan of New York hailed the papal letter as the highest sanction of his own opposition to the single tax doctrine as preached by Dr. McGlynn and Henry George. In London, Cardinal Manning told Mr. George's eldest son, who chanced to be there, that the Pope's letter aimed at the Henry George teachings; although he intimated that between the postulates and the deduction Henry George could drive a coach and four. Mr. George wrote to his son: "For my part, I regard the encyclical letter as aimed at us, and at us alone, almost. And I feel very much encouraged by the honor." He later wrote (June 9): "I think I ought to write something about it. Of course the Pope's letter itself is very weak; but to reply to him might give an opportunity of explaining our principles to many people who know little or nothing about them."

... He wrote to his son (August 21): "I think I have done a good piece of work and that it will be useful and will attract attention.... What I have really aimed at is to make a clear, brief explanation of our principles; to show their religious character, and to draw a line between us and the socialists. I have written really for such men as Cardinal Manning, General Booth, and religious-minded men of all creeds."

... Mr. George himself, answering a correspondent in the columns of the New York Sun in January 1893, said:

That the encyclical on the "Condition of Labor" seemed to me to condemn the "single tax" theory is true. But it made it clear that the Pope did not rightly understand that theory. It was for this reason that in the open letter to which your correspondent refers I asked permission to lay before the Pope the grounds of our belief and to show that "our postulates are all stated or implied in your encyclical" and that "they are the primary perceptions of human reason, the fundamental teachings of the Christian faith," declaring that, so far from avoiding, "we earnestly seek the judgment of religion, the tribunal of which your Holiness, as the head of the largest body of Christians, is the most august representative." The answer has come. In the reinstatement of Dr. McGlynn on a correct presentation of "single tax" doctrines, the highest authority of the Catholic Church has declared in the most emphatic manner that there is nothing in them inconsistent with the Catholic faith. From henceforth the encyclical on the "Condition of Labor" — a most noble and noteworthy declaration that religion is concerned with the social evils of our time, and that chronic poverty is not to be regarded as a dispensation of Providence — is evidently to be understood not as disapproving the "single tax", but as disapproving of the grotesque misrepresentations of it that were evidently at first presented to the Pope.

It is fortunate for Mr. George that he was satisfied with this "answer" from the Church of Rome, because it remains the only such answer that he and his followers ever got.

To Pope Leo XIII.

Your Holiness —

I have read with care your Encyclical letter on the condition of labor [1], addressed, through the Patriarchs, Primates, Archbishops, and Bishops of your faith, to the Christian world.

Since its most strikingly pronounced condemnations 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 unfortunately overlooked. The momentous seriousness 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.

I

Fundamental Principles affecting Land and its Rent

Moral-philosophical foundations

OUR postulates are all stated or implied in your Encyclical. They are the primary perceptions of human reason, the fundamental teachings of the Christian faith.

We hold: That —

This world is the creation of God [2].

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 labor — 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.

God has not put on man the task of making bricks without straw. With the need for labor and the power to labor He has also given to man the material for labor. 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 enjoyment 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 labor — a right that the possessor may transfer, but of which to deprive him without his will is theft.

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 labor, but cannot attach to 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 [3]. 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 labor brings forth. But he cannot obtain a similar right of property 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 to things produced by labor is to impair and deny the true rights of property. For a man who, out of the proceeds of his labor, 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.

Security of land tenure

As to the use of land, we hold: That —

While the right of ownership that justly attaches to things produced by labor cannot attach to land, there may attach to land a right of possession. As your Holiness says (8), "God has granted the earth to mankind in general, not in the sense that all without distinction 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 common use or of specific division. Such things may properly be assigned to some of the children, 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 possession of land is not necessary. But as men begin to cultivate the ground and expend their labor in permanent works, private possession of the land on which labor is thus expended is needed to secure the right of property in the products of labor. 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 exclusive 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 labor. The one is limited, the other unlimited, 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 labor; and it can never rightfully be carried so far as to impair or deny this. While anyone may hold exclusive 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 refuse him any use of the earth unless by laboring for them, or by giving them part of the products of his labor he bought it of them, would be for them to commit theft.

Reconciling common ownership & private possession

God's laws do not change. Though their applications 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 industries. In our cities of millions and our States of scores of millions, in a civilization where the division of labor 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 labor 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, always indicates the precise value of the benefit to which all are entitled in its use, as distinguished from the value which, as producer or successor of a producer, belongs to the possessor in individual right.

To combine the advantages of private possession with the justice of common ownership, it is only necessary, therefore, to take for common uses what value attaches to land irrespective of any exertion of labor 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 common 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 propose 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 possession 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 of industry — which taxes, since they take from the earnings of labor, we hold to be infringements 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 labor — 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 civilization, however elaborate, there must be some way in which the exclusive right to the products 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 participation of men in the opportunities of life and labor, we must ignore the right of private property. Nor yet can it be, as you yourself in the Encyclical seem to argue, that to secure the right of private property, we must ignore the equality of right in the opportunities of life and labor. 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 individual, 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 labor.

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 labor 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 legislation.

It is true, as you say — a salutary truth too often forgotten — that (7) "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 provided for all things, foresaw and provided that with the increase of population and the development of industry, the organization of human society into States or Governments would become both expedient and necessary.

The need for public revenue

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 civilization, 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 civilization 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.

Hence:

It must not take from individuals what rightfully 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 requiring 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 production and the fairest division of wealth.

Immorality of present methods of taxation

Let me ask your Holiness to consider the taxes on the processes and products of industry by which, through the civilized world, public revenues are collected — the octroi duties that surround Italian cities with barriers; the monstrous customs duties that hamper intercοurse between so-called Christian States; the taxes on occupations, on earnings, on investments, on the building of houses, on the cultivation of fields, 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 advantage 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 impoverishing 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 harmonious, 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 labor, and out of its effects in increasing the price of what some have to sell and others must 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.

"By their fruits ye shall 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?

The proper and natural source of public revenue

But to consider what we propose — the raising 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 labor or investment of capital on or in it, the values produced in this way being values of improvements, which we would exempt. The value of land, irrespective 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 purchase-money; while if the user be also the owner, it is as owner, not as user, that he receives it, and by selling or [47] renting the land he can, as owner, continue to receive it after he ceases to be a user.

Thus taxes on land irrespective of improvement cannot lessen the rewards of industry, nor add to prices,¹ nor in any way take from the individual what belongs to the individual. They can only take the value that attaches to land by the growth of the community, and which therefore belongs to the community as a whole.

¹ As to this point, it may be well to add that all economists 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 onto the user. To explain 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 production — 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 [47]. Thus taxes on wheat or tobacco or cloth add to the price that the consumer 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 —

(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 labor can earn on it beyond what is necessary to life;
(economic rent proper) where there is no special monopoly, by what the particular land will yield to common labor over and above what may be had by like expenditure and exertion on land having no special advantage and for which no rent is paid; and
(speculative rent, which is a species of monopoly rent, telling particularly in selling-price) by the expectation of future increase of value from social growth and improvement, which expectation, causing landowners to withhold land at present prices, has the same effect as combination [collusion].

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 landowners to check supply by withholding land from use. Where rent depends on mere monopolization — a case I mention 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 extort from labor could not enable them to extort any more, since laborers if not left enough to live on will die. So in the case of economic rent proper, to take from the landowners the premiums they receive would in no way increase 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.

[Editor's note: It is of no consequence that in this footnote, the 1898 and 1947 editions have "wheat or sugar or tobacco" instead of "wheat or tobacco or cloth". But it is of great consequence that the proposed tax is on the value of land — that is, on potential rent, regardless of whether the land is actually "rented". If the tax were on the rent actually paid, the landowner could avoid the tax by "withholding land" from the market, and thereby "check supply". This scenario is often tacitly used by landlords' advocates in order to pretend that "land tax" raises rents. But the scenario is fictitious. In real life, and under George's proposal, "withholding land" from the market does not avoid liability for land tax, but only forfeits the rental income from which the tax must be paid. Thus, as George says, the tax "destroys the power" to withhold land from use. The definition of "economic rent proper" is a statement of Ricardo's law, which assumes that landlords are "competing" with unclaimed land that can be had for no rent. In this case, the tax paid by the landlord on the land-value cannot increase the rent because it does not increase the margin by which the productivity of the land exceeds that of the least productive land in use.]

To take land-values for the State, abolishing all taxes on the products of labor, would therefore leave to the laborer the full produce of labor, to the individual all that rightfully belongs to the individual. It would impose no burden on industry, no check on commerce, no 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 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 innocent.

But further: That God has intended the State to obtain the revenues it needs by the taxation of land-values, is shown by the same order and degree of evidence that shows that God has intended the milk of the mother for the nourishment of the babe.

See how close is the analogy. In that primitive condition, ere the need for the State arises, there are no land-values. The products of labor have value, but in the sparsity of population, no value as yet attaches to land itself. But as increasing density of population and increasing elaboration of industry necessitate the organization 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 connection is invariable. The value of things produced by labor tends to decline with social development, since the larger scale of production and the improvement of processes tend steadily to reduce their cost. But the value of land, on which population centers, 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?

Growth towards equality

That it does mean this and nothing else is confirmed if we look deeper still, and inquire not merely as to the intent, but as to the purpose 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. 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 labor does not increase, tends, with the advance of civilization, to make the share that goes equally to each member of society more and more important as compared with what goes to him from his individual earnings, and thus to make the advance of civilization lessen relatively the differences that, in a ruder social state, must exist between the strong and the weak, the fortunate and the unfortunate? Does it not show the purpose of the Creator to be that the advance of man in civilization 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?

Consequences of resisting natural law

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.

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, distort distribution, and corrupt society. It is to leave some to take what justly belongs to all; it is to forgo the only means by which it is possible, in an advanced civilization, to combine 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 between man and man, compelling some to pay others for the privilege of living, for the chance of working, for the advantages of civilization, 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 speculation in land wherever there is any prospect of advancing population or of coming improvement, thus producing an artificial scarcity of the natural elements of life and labor, 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 improve 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 provision 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 are dispelling.

The darkness in light, the weakness in strength, the poverty amid wealth, the seething discontent foreboding civil strife, that characterize our civilization of today, are the natural and inevitable results of our rejection of God's beneficence, of our ignoring of His intent. Were we, on the other hand, to follow His clear, simple rule of right, leaving scrupulously to the individual all that individual labor produces, 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 opportunity to exert their labor and to enjoy its fruits. And then, without drastic or restrictive 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 anyone 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 [4], in pointing out to the clergy and laity of his diocese the design of Divine Providence that the rent of land should be taken for the community,¹ 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 property, 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 government, the administration of its laws and the education of its youth, and to enable it to provide 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."

¹ Letter addressed to the Clergy and Laity of the Diocese of Meath, Ireland, April 2, 1881 [republished by Wealth and Want].

There is indeed, as Bishop Nulty says, a peculiar beauty in the clearness with which the wisdom and benevolence of Providence are revealed 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 civilization, we see that God has intended civilization, that all our discoveries and inventions do not and cannot outrun his forethought, and that steam, electricity, and labor-saving appliances only make the great moral laws clearer and more important. In the 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 engender 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 civilization, secure to all the equal enjoyment of God's bounty, the abundant opportunity to satisfy their wants, and would 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 intended that bitter competition of the masses for a mere animal existence and that monstrous aggregation of wealth which characterize our civilization; but that these evils, which lead so many to say there is no God, or yet more impiously 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 we were only to observe it, there would be work for all, leisure for all, abundance for all; and that civilization 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.

II

Review of Certain Arguments in the Encyclical

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 possible, of taxes on the products and processes of labor, and the consequent concentration of taxation on land-values irrespective of improvements. 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 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 behooves 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 (15) 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 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, as when from the moral sanction of private property in the things produced by labor, you infer something entirely different and utterly opposed: a similar right of property in the land created by God.

Private property is not of one species, and moral sanction can no more be asserted universally of it than of marriage. That proper marriage conforms to the law of God does not justify the polygamic or polyandric or incestuous marriages that are in some countries permitted by the civil law. And as there may be immoral marriage, so may there be immoral private property. Private property is that which may be held in ownership by an individual, or that which may be held in ownership 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 a servant of the State, but a servant of God, a guardian of morals. You know, as said by St. Thomas of Aquin, that:

"Human law is law only in virtue of its accordance with right reason, and it is thus 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."

Thus, that any species of property is permitted 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 instance, 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 appointing 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 property by the customs and laws of the classical nations, and were so acknowledged in Europe long after the acceptance of Christianity. At the beginning of this century there was no Christian nation that did not, in her colonies at least, recognize 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 labor can, or ever could, apply to property in slaves.

Your use in so many passages of your Encyclical of the inclusive term property, or private property, of which in morals nothing can be either affirmed or denied, makes your meaning, if we take isolated sentences, in many places ambiguous. But reading it as a whole, there can be no doubt of your intention that private property in land shall be understood when you speak merely of private property. With this interpretation I find that the reasons you urge for private property in land are eight. Let me consider them in order of presentation.

You urge:

1. That what is bought with rightful property is rightful property (5).*

* To facilitate reference the paragraphs of the Encyclical are indicated by number. [A different footnote appears in the 1898 edition, which includes the encyclical as an appendix and refers to it by page numbers in footnotes.]

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.

Slavery excused by this argument

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 [5]. It would then read:

"It is surely undeniable that when a man engages in remunerative labor, the very reason and motive of his work is to obtain property 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 purpose 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 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 completely at his own disposal as the wages he receives for his labor."

Nor in turning your argument for private property in land into an argument for private property in men am I doing a new thing. In my own country, in my own time, this very argument — that purchase gave ownership — was the common defense 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 labor, the appropriation of its fruits, the buying and selling 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.

Chattel-slavery vs. tenant-slavery

The error of our people, in thinking that what in itself was not rightful property could become rightful property by purchase and sale, is the same error into which your Holiness falls. It is not merely formally the same; it is essentially the same. Private property in land, no less than private property in slaves, is a violation of the true rights of property. They are different forms of the same robbery — twin devices by which the perverted ingenuity of man has sought to enable the strong and the cunning to escape God's requirement of labor by forcing 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 labor — 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 labor of another without recompense. 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 laborers of Italy and England get than did the slaves of our Southern States? Did not private property in land permit the landowner of Europe in ruder times to demand the jus primæ noctis? Does not the same last outrage exist today 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 to the master land on which the serf was forced to live? When an Ivan or a Catherine enriched their favorites with the labor 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 labor-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 Christian countries its ruder form has now gone, it still exists in the heart of our civilization 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 of your Holiness, Cardinal Lavigerie is sending into the Sahara. Yet your Encyclical employs in defense of one form of slavery the same fallacies that the apologists for chattel-slavery used in defense of the other!

The Arabs are not wanting in acumen. Your Encyclical reaches far. What shall your warrior 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 propose 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 condition in life?"

2. That private property in land proceeds from man's gift of reason (6–7).

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 products he may make provision for the future.

Man's reason vs. God's reason

Reason, with its attendant forethought, is indeed 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 produced by physical labor. In truth, these elements of man's production are inseparable and labor 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 utilize to its will the matter and forces of nature. It is mind, the intelligent reason, that is the prime mover in labor, 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 forethought 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, results from the providence of the men who carried 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 carrying water where it is needed, but the forethought of seizing springs, that you seek to defend in defending the private ownership of land!

Man's "production" vs. God's creation

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 labor is not just, as the material of these products is taken from land. It will be seen on consideration that all of man's production is analogous 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 production, 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 labor 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 into the desert passes rightfully into the ownership 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 constitutes 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 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 labor.

Hence, when you say that man's reason puts it within his right to have in stable and permanent 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 labor, since they lose in time the impress of that labor 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 ownership in the earth itself, as he can in the fruits that he, by labor, brings forth from it, is in the facts stated by you in the very next paragraph (7), when you truly say:

"Man's needs do not die out, but recur; satisfied today, they demand new supplies tomorrow. 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."

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 [4]:

"God was perfectly free in the act by which He created us; but, having created us, He bound 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 benevolent intentions of his Creator."

3. That private property in land deprives no one of the use of land (8).

Your own statement that land is the inexhaustible 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 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 labor, obtain in payment the produce of the land.

Stolen heritage

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 ownership. 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?

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 contribute their labor 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 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?

Instrument of genocide

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" (8) 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 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 sepulcher 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 recognized 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.*

* [Footnote in the 1904 and 1982 editions:] Let anyone who wishes visit this Diocese and see with his own eyes the vast and boundless extent of the fairest land in Europe that has been ruthlessly depopulated since the commencement of the present century, and which is now abandoned to a loneliness and solitude more depressing than that of the prairie or the wilderness. Thus has this land system actually exercised the power of life and death on a vast scale, for which there is no parallel even in the dark records of slavery. — Bishop Nulty's Letter to the Clergy and Laity of the Diocese of Meath.

Artificial scarcity

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 artificial 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 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 ownership in the land itself (9–10).

Your Holiness next contends that industry expended 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 argument calls for confiscation!

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 take land from those who now legally own it, the landlords, and turn it over to the tenants and laborers. And if it also be that improvements cannot be distinguished and separated from the land itself, how could the landlords claim consideration 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 labor 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 fully to operate and there has been some attempt to give land to users, it is probably true today that the greater part of the land is held by those who neither use it nor propose to use it themselves, but merely hold it to compel others to pay them for permission to use it.

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 you 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?

Proof that improvements are distinguishable

But your contention is not valid within any limits or to any extent [82]. Industry expended on 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 labor on land; nor does the improvement of land create benefits indistinguishable and inseparable from the land itself. That secure possession is necessary to the use and improvement of land, I have already explained; but that ownership is not necessary is shown by the fact that in all civilized 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 transactions 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 infrequent 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, 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.

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 system does not do. And 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 labor 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 labor should belong to him who has labored" (10). But private property in land — to allow the holder, without adequate payment to the State, to take for himself the benefit of the value that attaches to land with social growth and improvement — does take the results of labor from him who has labored, does turn over the fruits of one man's labor to be enjoyed by another. For labor, 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 labor he could not get a meal or provide himself a garment. Hence when the owners of land, by virtue of their ownership and without laboring themselves, get the products of labor in abundance, these things must come from the labor 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 labor he does not earn. For until land will yield to its owner some return beyond that of the labor and capital he expends on it — that is to say, until by sale or rental he can, without expenditure of labor, obtain from it products of labor — ownership amounts to no more than security 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 labor without exertion on his part, and thus to enjoy the results of others' labor.

Robbery of the community

What largely keeps men from realizing 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. For, 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 improvement — 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 centers as London or New York are not individually 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 community, 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 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. That private property in land has the support of the common opinion of mankind, and has conduced to peace and tranquillity, and that it is sanctioned by the Divine Law (11).

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.

Landed property unknown in most cultures

But it is not true. Examination will show that wherever we can trace them, the first perceptions of mankind have always recognized the equality of right to land, and that when individual possession became necessary to secure the right of ownership in things produced by labor, some method of securing equality, sufficient in the existing state of social development, was adopted. Thus, among some peoples, 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 labor, 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 civilization it corrupted 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 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 wayworn, while the military tenures provided for public defense and bore the costs of war. A fourth and very large portion of the land remained in common, the people of the neighborhood 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 laborer was devoid of that grinding poverty which despite our marvelous advances now exists. Speaking of England, the highest authority on such subjects, the late Professor Thorold Rogers, declares that in the thirteenth century there was no class so poor, so helpless, so pressed and degraded as are millions of Englishmen in our boasted nineteenth century, and that, save in times of actual famine, there was no laborer 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 admiration 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 morning 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 had destroyed Rome was extended. As to England, it may briefly be said that the Crown lands were for the most part given away to favorites; 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 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 remitted, would today 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 turbulence 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 thoroughly established in English thought before the colonial period ended, and it has been so treated by the United States and by the several 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 possession 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 remain there, since, no matter how great its value, its possession will be profitable only to users.

Fighting over land

As to private property in land having conduced to the peace and tranquility 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 civilization.

Landed property condemned by Scripture

Your Holiness intimates that the Divine Law gives its sanction to the private ownership of land, quoting from Deuteronomy, "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor'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 today, 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 bondsmen for a term of years and to perpetual slaves [6]. But the word "field" involves the idea of use and improvement, to which the right of possession and ownership attaches without recognition of property in the land itself. And that this reference to the field is not a sanction of private property in land as it exists today is proved by the fact that the Mosaic code expressly denied such unqualified ownership in land [98], and with the declaration "The land also shall not be sold forever: because it is mine, and you are strangers and sojourners with me," provided for its reversion every fiftieth year — thus, in a way adapted to the primitive industrial conditions of the people and [82] time, preventing men from being deprived 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 labor. 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 (13–15).

With all that your Holiness has to say of the sacredness of the family relation we are in full accord. But how the obligation of the father to the child can justify private property in land we cannot see. You reason that private property in land is necessary to the discharge of the duty of the father, and is therefore requisite and just because:

"It is a most sacred law of Nature that a father must provide food and all necessaries for those whom he has begotten; and similarly Nature dictates that a man's children, who carry on, as it were, and continue his own personality, should be provided by him with all that is needful to enable them honorably to keep themselves from want and misery in the uncertainties of this mortal life. Now in no other way can a father effect this except by the ownership of profitable property which he can transmit to his children by inheritance" (13)."

Thanks to Him who has bound the generations of men together by a provision that brings the tenderest love to greet our entrance into the world and soothes our exit with filial piety, it is both the duty and the joy of the father to care for the child till its powers mature, and afterwards in the natural order it becomes the duty and privilege of the child to be the stay of the parent. This is the natural reason for that relation of marriage, the groundwork of the sweetest, tenderest, and purest of human joys, which the Catholic Church has guarded with such unremitting vigilance.

We do for a few years need the providence of our fathers after the flesh. But how small, how transient, how narrow is this need as compared with our constant need for the providence of Him in whom we live, move, and have our being — Our Father who art in Heaven! It is to Him, "the giver of every good and perfect gift", and not to our fathers after the flesh, that Christ taught us to pray: "Give us this day our daily bread." And how true it is that through Him the generations of men exist. Let the mean temperature of the earth rise or fall a few degrees, an amount as nothing compared with differences produced in our laboratories, and mankind would disappear as ice disappears under a tropical sun, would fall as the leaves fall at the touch of frost. Or let for two or three seasons the earth refuse her increase, and how many of our millions would remain alive [98]?

Bequests not possible for all

The duty of fathers to transmit to their children profitable property that will enable them to keep themselves from want and misery in the uncertainties of this mortal life! What is not possible cannot be a duty. And how is it possible for fathers to do that? Your Holiness has not considered how mankind really lives from hand to mouth, getting each day its daily bread — how little one generation does or can leave another. It is doubtful if the wealth of the civilized world all told amounts to anything like as much as one year's labor, while it is certain that if labor were to stop and men had to rely on existing accumulation, it would be only a few days ere in the richest countries pestilence and famine would stalk.

The profitable property your Holiness refers to is private property in land. Now profitable land, as all economists will agree, is land superior to the land that the ordinary man can get. It is land that will yield an income to the owner as owner, and therefore that will permit the owner to appropriate the products of labor without doing labor, its profitableness to the individual involving the robbery of other individuals. It is therefore possible only for some fathers to leave their children profitable land. What therefore your Holiness practically declares is that it is the duty of all fathers to struggle to leave their children what only the few peculiarly strong, lucky, or unscrupulous can leave, and that a something that involves the robbery of others — their deprivation of the material gifts of God.

This anti-Christian doctrine has been long in practice throughout the Christian world. What are its results?

Are they not the very evils set forth in your Encyclical? Are they not, so far from enabling men to keep themselves from want and misery in the uncertainties of this mortal life, to condemn the great masses of men to want and misery that the natural conditions of our mortal life do not entail — to want and misery deeper and more widespread than exist among heathen savages? Under the régime of private property in land and in the richest countries, not five per cent of fathers are able at their death to leave anything substantial to their children, and probably a large majority do not leave enough to bury them! Some few children are left by their fathers richer than it is good for them to be, but the vast majority not only are left nothing by their fathers, but by the system that makes land private property are deprived of the bounty of their Heavenly Father; are compelled to sue others for permission to live and to work, and to toil all their lives for a pittance that often does not enable them to escape starvation and pauperism.

What your Holiness is actually, though of course inadvertently, urging is that earthly fathers should assume the functions of the Heavenly Father. It is not the business of one generation to provide the succeeding generation with "all that is needful to enable them honorably to keep themselves from want and misery". That is God's business. We no more create our children than we create our fathers. It is God who is the Creator of each succeeding generation, as fully as of the one that preceded it. And, to recall your own words, "Nature [God], therefore, owes to man a storehouse that shall never fail, the daily supply of his daily wants. And this he finds only in the inexhaustible fertility of the earth." What you are now assuming is that it is the duty of men to provide for the wants of their children by appropriating this storehouse and depriving other men's children of the unfailing supply that God has provided for all.

The duty of the father to the child — the duty possible to all fathers! Is it not so to conduct himself, so to nurture and teach it, that it shall come to manhood with a sound body, well developed mind, habits of virtue, piety, and industry, and in a state of society that shall give it and all others free access to the bounty of God, the providence of the All-Father?

Inheritances not always beneficial

In doing this the father would be doing more to secure his children from want and misery than is possible now to the richest of fathers — as much more as the providence of God surpasses that of man. For the justice of God laughs at the efforts of men to circumvent it, and the subtle law that binds humanity together poisons the rich in the sufferings of the poor. Even the few who are able in the general struggle to leave their children wealth that they fondly think will keep them from want and misery in the uncertainties of this mortal life — do they succeed? Does experience show that it is a benefit to a child to place him above his fellows and enable him to think God's law of labor is not for him? Is not such wealth oftener a curse than a blessing, and does not its expectation often destroy filial love and bring dissensions and 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 today in lazzaroni, and that the descendants of kings and princes tenant slums and workhouses.

But in the state of society we strive for, where the monopoly and waste of God's bounty would be done away with and the fruits of labor would go to the laborer, it would be within the ability of all to make more than a comfortable living with reasonable labor. And for those who might be crippled or incapacitated or deprived of their natural protectors and breadwinners, the most ample provision could be made out of that great and increasing fund with which God in His law of rent has provided society — not as a matter of niggardly and degrading alms [47], but as a matter of right, as the assurance which in a Christian State society owes to all its members.

Thus it is that the duty of the father, the obligation to the child, instead of giving any support to private property in land, utterly condemns it, urging us by the most powerful considerations to abolish it in the simple and efficacious way of the single tax.

This duty of the father, this obligation to children, is not confined to those who have actually children of their own, but rests on all of us who have come to the powers and responsibilities of manhood.

For did not Christ set a little child in the midst of the disciples, saying to them that the angels of such little ones always behold the face of His Father; saying to them that it were better for a man to hang a millstone about his neck and plunge into the uttermost depths of the sea than to injure such a little one?

And what today is the result of private property in land in the richest of so-called Christian countries? Is it not that young people fear to marry; that married people fear to have children; that children are driven out of life from sheer want of proper nourishment and care, or compelled to toil when they ought to be at school or at play; that great numbers of those who attain maturity enter it with under-nourished bodies, overstrained nerves, undeveloped minds — under conditions that foredoom them not merely to suffering, but to crime; that fit them in advance for the prison and the brothel?

If your Holiness will consider these things we are confident that instead of defending private property in land you will condemn it with anathema!

7. That the private ownership of land stimulates industry, increases wealth, and attaches men to the soil and to their country (47).

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 labor. It 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 abolition of other taxes — would give to the user of land far greater security for the fruits of his labor 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 productive 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 [7], 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.

Foreigners in their own country

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 not ask his dog to dwell; how the great majority 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 today: "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 civilized world — is becoming increasingly true. It is the inevitable effect, as civilization progresses, of private property in land.

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 (47).

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 doubtless aided in the confusion of your own thought. But the context leaves no doubt that by private property you mean private property in land, and by private owner the private owner of land.

Ownership vs. possession

The contention thus made that private property 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 contradictory, property in the proceeds of labor. 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 labor is from Nature is clear, for Nature gives such things to labor and to labor alone. Of every article of this kind, we know that it came into being as Nature's response to the 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 labor. They do not belong to Caesar. 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 labor.

But who will dare trace the individual ownership of land to any grant from the Maker of land? What does Nature give to such ownership? How does she in any way recognize 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 labor, man may 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 injustice 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.

Compensation for landowners?

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 rights can be restored to them, the present owners of land shall first be compensated [8].

For not only will you see that the single tax will directly and largely benefit small landowners, whose interests as laborers and capitalists are much greater than their interests as landowners, and that though the great landowners — or rather the propertied class in general, among whom the profits of land-ownership are really divided through mortgages [9], 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 calculation 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 landowners 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. Compensation in such case would be a continuance of the same injustice in another form — the giving to landowners 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 realize 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 demand 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 landowners for compensation is not that. We do not seek to spoil the Egyptians. We do not ask that what has been unjustly taken from laborers 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-values have taken the fruits of labor to retain what they have thus got. We merely propose that for the future such robbery of labor 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.

III

Economics and Policies of Other Schools of Thought

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 common. 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 social improvement is needed or is possible. But it is not fair to confound with them those who, however mistakenly, propose definite schemes of remedy.

Socialism vs. Anarchism

The Socialists, as I understand them, and as the term has come to apply to anything like a definite theory and not to be vaguely and improperly used to include all who desire social improvement, do not, as you imply, seek the 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 direction 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, contractors, and middlemen, which they regard as waste; to do away with the wage system and secure general coöperation; and to prevent competition, which they deem the fundamental cause of the impoverishment of labor. 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 organized society for the free play of individual desire and effort.

Though not usually classed as Socialists, both the Trades Unionists and the Protectionists have the same essential character. The Trades Unionists seek the increase of wages, the reduction of working hours, and the general improvement in the condition of wage-workers, by organizing them into guilds or associations which shall fix the rates at which they will sell their labor, shall deal as one body with employers 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 assisting 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 coöperation is needed.

Differing from all these are those for whom I would speak. Believing that the rights of true property are sacred, we would regard forcible Communism as robbery that would bring destruction. But we would not be disposed to deny that voluntary Communism might be the highest possible state of which men can conceive. Nor do we say that it cannot be possible for mankind to attain it, since among the early Christians and among the religious orders of the Catholic Church we have examples of communistic societies on a small scale. St. Peter and St. Paul, St. Thomas of Aquin and Fra Angelico, the illustrious orders of the Carmelites and Franciscans, the Jesuits, whose heroism carried the Cross among the most savage tribes of American forests, the societies that wherever your communion is known have deemed no work of mercy too dangerous or too repellent, were or are Communists [10]. Knowing these things, we cannot take it on ourselves to say that a social condition may not be possible in which an all-embracing love shall have taken the place of all other motives. But we see that Communism is only possible where there exists a general and intense religious faith, and we see that such a state can be reached only through a state of justice. For before a man can be a saint he must first be an honest man.

With both Anarchists and Socialists we, who for want of a better term have come to call ourselves single-tax men, fundamentally differ. We regard them as erring in opposite directions, the one in ignoring the social nature of man, the other in ignoring his individual nature. While we see that man is primarily an individual, and that nothing but evil has come or can come from the interference by the State with things that belong to individual action, we also see that he is a social being, or, as Aristotle called him, a political animal, and that the State is requisite to social advance, having an indispensable place in the natural order. Looking on the bodily organism as the analogue of the social organism, and on the proper functions of the State as akin to those which in the human organism are discharged by the conscious intelligence, while the play of individual impulse and interest performs functions akin to those discharged in the bodily organism by the unconscious instincts and involuntary motions, the Anarchists seem to us like men who would try to get along without heads, and the Socialists like men who would try to rule the wonderfully complex and delicate internal relations of their frames by conscious will.

The philosophical Anarchists of whom I speak are few in number and of little practical importance. It is with Socialism in its various phases that we have to do battle.

Socialism vs. the Single Tax

With the Socialists we have some points of agreement, for we recognize fully the social nature of man and believe that all monopolies should be held and governed by the State. In these, and in directions where the general health, knowledge, comfort, and convenience might be improved, we too would extend the functions of the State.

But, it seems to us, the vice of Socialism in all its degrees is its want of radicalism, of going to the root [11]. It takes its theories from those who have sought to justify the impoverishment of the masses, and its advocates generally teach the preposterous and degrading doctrine that slavery was the first condition of labor. It assumes that the tendency of wages to a minimum is the natural law, and seeks to abolish wages; it assumes that the natural result of competition is to grind down workers, and seeks to abolish competition by restrictions, prohibitions, and extensions of governing power. Thus mistaking effects for causes and childishly blaming the stone for hitting it, it wastes strength in striving for remedies that when not worse are futile. Associated though it is in many places with democratic aspiration, yet its essence is the same delusion to which the children of Israel yielded when, against the protest of their prophet, they insisted on a king — the delusion that has everywhere corrupted democracies and enthroned tyrants: that power over the people can be used for the benefit of the people, that there may be devised machinery that through human agencies will secure for the management of individual affairs more wisdom and more virtue than the people themselves possess.

This superficiality and this tendency may be seen in all the phases of Socialism.

Take, for instance, Protectionism. What support it has — beyond the mere selfish desire of sellers to compel buyers to pay them more than their goods are worth — springs from such superficial 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 unanalyzing recognition of the phenomena that necessarily follow when men, who have the need to labor, are deprived by monopoly of access to the natural and indispensable element of all labor. Its methods involve the idea that Governments can more wisely direct the expenditure of labor and the investment of capital than can laborers 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 corruption. And they would, were the theory carried to its logical conclusion, destroy civilization 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 labor, and strives for the elevation of only a small part of the great body by means that cannot help the rest. Aiming at the restriction of competition — the limitation of the right to labor — its methods are like those of an army, which even in a righteous cause are subversive of liberty and liable to abuse, while its weapon, the strike, is destructive in its nature, both to combatants and non-combatants, 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 labor 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 res

The Condition of Labor

An Open Letter to Pope Leo XIII

Contents

Editor's preface

I

Fundamental Principles affecting Land and its Rent

Moral-philosophical foundations

Security of land tenure

Reconciling common ownership & private possession

The need for public revenue

Immorality of present methods of taxation

The proper and natural source of public revenue

Growth towards equality

Consequences of resisting natural law

II

Review of Certain Arguments in the Encyclical

1. That what is bought with rightful property is rightful property (5).*

Slavery excused by this argument

Chattel-slavery vs. tenant-slavery

2. That private property in land proceeds from man's gift of reason (6–7).

Man's reason vs. God's reason

Man's "production" vs. God's creation

3. That private property in land deprives no one of the use of land (8).

Stolen heritage

Instrument of genocide

Artificial scarcity

4. That industry expended on land gives ownership in the land itself (9–10).

This argument calls for confiscation!

Proof that improvements are distinguishable

Robbery of the community

5. That private property in land has the support of the common opinion of mankind, and has conduced to peace and tranquillity, and that it is sanctioned by the Divine Law (11).

Landed property unknown in most cultures

Fighting over land

Landed property condemned by Scripture

6. That fathers should provide for their children, and that private property in land is necessary to enable them to do so (13–15).

Bequests not possible for all

Inheritances not always beneficial

7. That the private ownership of land stimulates industry, increases wealth, and attaches men to the soil and to their country (47).

Foreigners in their own country

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 (47).

Ownership vs. possession

Compensation for landowners?

III

Economics and Policies of Other Schools of Thought

Socialism vs. Anarchism

Socialism vs. the Single Tax