Page:The Complete Works of Henry George Volume 3.djvu/246

 54 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.

injustice in another form the giving to landowners in the shape of interest of what they before got as rent. Your Holiness knows that justice and injustice are not thus to be juggled with, and when you fully realize that land is really the storehouse that God owes to all his children, you will no more listen to any demand for compensation for restoring it to them than Moses would have listened to a demand that Pharaoh should be com- pensated before letting the children of Israel go.

Compensated for what ? For giving up what has been unjustly taken? The demand of landowners for com- pensation is not that. We do not seek to spoil the Egyptians. We do not ask that what has been unjustly taken from laborers shall be restored. We are willing that bygones should be bygones and to leave dead wrongs to bury their dead. We propose to let those who by the past appropriation of land values have taken the fruits of labor to retain what they have thus got. We merely propose that for the future such robbery of labor shall cease that for the future, not for the past, landholders shall pay to the community the rent that to the community is justly due.

��III.

I have said enough to show your Holiness the injustice into which you fall in classing us, who in seeking virtu- ally to abolish private property in land seek more fully to secure the true rights of property, with those whom you speak of as socialists, who wish to make all property common. But you also do injustice to the socialists.

There are many, it is true, who feeling bitterly the monstrous wrongs of the present distribution of wealth are animated only by a blind hatred of the rich and a

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