Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/481

Rh the world. To it is due the emancipation of labor, and the development by that of public wealth in the nineteenth century. Because a generation or two, in two or three countries, have abused it, is no reason for forgetting its services, especially at a time when we see the old chains brought back, or new ones in forging, with which to load industry and labor.

The third part of the Pope's Encyclical is devoted to this important subject, and, after touching upon several aspects of the question, he concludes that "equity requires that the state concern itself with the workmen, and so act that, of all the goods they secure for society, a suitable part shall return to them, such as habitation and clothing, and that they may live at the cost of the fewest pains and privations. "Whence it follows that the state should favor all that closely or remotely appears calculated to ameliorate their lot." Such is the Pope's theory; but this is of less importance than the practice. If the state has a right to intervene, what should be the conditions and what the limits of its intervention? The Pope is very careful in expressing himself on this point, and declares that intervention ought not to be exercised except when it is absolutely indispensable, or when there is no other means of opposing the evils with which society is afflicted, and should be limited to seeing that every individual's rights are respected and preserved. If it comes to pass, he says, that workmen, abandoning their work or suspending it by strikes, menace public tranquillity; that the natural bonds of the family are relaxed among them; that religion is violated by employers not leaving them time to perform their duties of worship; if, by promiscuous mingling of the sexes or other excitations to vice, the factories imperil morality; if the employer imposes iniquitous burdens on the workmen, or dishonors their manhood by unworthy and degrading conditions; if he endangers their health by excessive tasks, disproportionate to their sex or age—in such cases it is necessary to use, within certain limits, the force and authority of the laws. In the protection of private rights, the Pope adds, the state should concern itself especially with the weak and indigent; and he qualifies his whole expression by saying that the law should undertake nothing beyond what is necessary to repress abuses and remove dangers.

The idea of the state as a Providence appears to us not only false and pernicious from the social point of view; it seems to have about it, too, in these days, something unchristian: it has a pagan flavor, a scent of sacrilegious usurpation. We discern in it a pretension of the state to erect itself into a divinity which shall take the place of the invisible God and arrogate to itself his function on the earth. It is as if there were a revolution in the government of the universe, as if another Providence were coming in to