Page:The Complete Works of Henry George Volume 3.djvu/224

 32 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.

Let me dwell on the words of your Holiness, "Nature, therefore, owes to man a storehouse that shall never fail." By Nature you mean God. Thus your thought, that in creating us, God himself has incurred an obligation to provide us with a storehouse that shall never fail, is the same as is thus expressed and carried to its irresistible conclusion by the Bishop of Meath :

God was perfectly free in the act by which He created us ; but having created us he bound 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. " Terr am 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, 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 appro- priation 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.

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 abun- dant for our support. As he assigned no part of it to any one of us

�� �