Page:The Complete Works of Henry George Volume 3.djvu/259

 OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIH. 67

Thus, so long as private property in land continues so long as some men are treated as owners of the earth and other men can live on it only by their sufferance- human wisdom can devise no means by which the evils of our present condition may be avoided.

Nor yet could the wisdom of God.

By the light of that right reason of which St. Thomas speaks we may see that even he, the Almighty, so long as his laws remain what they are, could do nothing to prevent poverty and starvation while property in land continues.

How could he ? Should he infuse new vigor into the sunlight, new virtue into the air, new fertility into the soil, would not all this new bounty go to the owners of the land, and work not benefit, but rather injury, to mere laborers ? Should he open the minds of men to the possibilities of new substances, new adjustments, new powers, could this do any more to relieve poverty than steam, electricity and all the numberless discoveries and inventions of our time have done? Or, if he were to send down from the heavens above or cause to gush up from the subterranean depths, food, clothing, all the things that satisfy man's material desires, to whom under our laws would all these belong ? So far from benefiting man, would not this increase and extension of his bounty prove but a curse, enabling the privileged class more riotously to roll in wealth, and bringing the disinherited class to more wide-spread starvation or pauperism ?

��IV.

Believing that the social question is at bottom a reli- gious question, we deem it of happy augury to the world that in your Encyclical the most influential of all reli- gious teachers has directed attention to the condition of labor.

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