Page:The Complete Works of Henry George Volume 3.djvu/220

 28 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.

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 Encyc- lical 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 pro- ducing 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.

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 pro- duced by the exertion of reason and its attendant fore- thought, as well as in what is produced by physical labor. In truth, these elements of man's production are insepa- rable, and labor involves the use of reason. It is by his reason that man differs from the animals in being a

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