Page:The Complete Works of Henry George Volume 3.djvu/251

 OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIH. 69

buyers to pay them more than their goods are worth, springs from such superficial ideas as that production, not consumption, is the end of effort; that money is more valuable than money's-worth, and to sell more prof- itable than to buy ; and above all from a desire to limit competition, springing from an unanalyzing recognition of the phenomena that necessarily follow when men who have the need to labor are deprived by monopoly of access to the natural and indispensable element of all labor. Its methods involve the idea that governments can more wisely direct the expenditure of labor and the investment of capital than can laborers and capitalists, and that the men who control governments will use this power for the general good and not in their own inter- ests. They tend to multiply officials, restrict liberty, invent crimes. They promote perjury, fraud and corrup- tion. And they would, were the theory carried to its logical conclusion, destroy civilization and reduce man- kind to savagery.

Take trades-unionism. While within narrow lines trades-unionism promotes the idea of the mutuality of interests, and often helps to raise courage and further political education, and while it has enabled limited bodies of working-men to improve somewhat their con- dition, and gain, as it were, breathing-space, yet it takes no note of the general causes that determine the condi- tions of labor, and strives for the elevation of only a small part of the great body by means that cannot help the rest. Aiming at the restriction of competition the limitation of the right to labor, its methods are like those of an army, which even in a righteous cause are subver- sive of liberty and liable to abuse, while its weapon, the strike, is destructive in its nature, both to combatants and non-combatants, being a form of passive war. To apply the principle of trades-unions to all industry, as

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