Page:Oscar Ameringer - Socialism for the Farmer (1912).djvu/22

 all they got for the farm. But all this time she had a wad stuck away down in her stocking, where no one could see it. But the Lord saw it, and he smote her dead also. This is what happened to Christians who refused to divide up when Christianity was still in working order.

Nowadays the preachers explain that Ananias and his old lady were killed because they lied and not because they refused to divide their land. But anybody with a grain of sense ought to know that if folks got killed for lying in business only deaf and dumb people would populate this world.

Yes, the private ownership of land is wrong from the religious standpoint, but if people who claim to be saved don't care a rap for what God says, then what's the use for an ordinary mortal like myself to spring the religious argument against the private ownership of land? It wouldn't cause the most pious land owner on earth to part with enough soil to make a mud pie.

Land is the storehouse of nature, from which mankind draws the material to sustain life. Those who hold the key to this storehouse also hold in their hands the life of those who cannot enter without their permission.

Labor applied to land creates wealth; but those who are denied access to the soil can only create wealth by working for the owner of the land.

Land is the free gift of nature to all her children. If there such a thing as natural right, the right to the use of the land should be foremost. But in this world of strife and struggle there is no such a thing as natural right. "Might is right," and for thousands of years the mighty have possessed themselves of the land and used it to oppress and enslave the weak. Even a religion which proclaims the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Men failed to prevent a division of "God's Children" into lords and serfs, landlords and tenants.

As long as our population was small and land practically unlimited landlordism could not develop, for no man will voluntarily work for another for less than he can get by working for himself. But in the course of time the country became more densely populated. A capitalist government, with an eye for the interest of the class it served, presented whole empires to railroad companies. Up to 1896 our benevolent, paternalistic government gave 266,000,000 acres of land to the railroad promoters. The Northern Pacific alone received a grant of forty-eight million acres.

Most of these grants were obtained through fraud, bribery and the corruption of the representatives of the people,