Page:The Complete Works of Henry George Volume 3.djvu/241

 OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIH. 49

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, but as a matter of right, as the assur- ance 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 to-day 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 matu- rity enter it with under-nourished bodies, overstrained nerves, undeveloped minds under conditions that fore- doom 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 con- fident that instead of defending private property in land you will condemn it with anathema !

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