Page:The Complete Works of Henry George Volume 3.djvu/261

 OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIH. 69

See how fully adequate is the cause I have pointed out. The most important of all the material relations of man is his relation to the planet he inhabits, and hence, the "impious resistance to the benevolent intentions of his Creator," which, as Bishop Nulty says, is involved in private property in land, must produce evils wherever it exists. But by virtue of the law, " unto whom much is given, from him much is required," the very progress of civilization makes the evils produced by private property in land more wide-spread and intense.

What is producing throughout the civilized world that condition of things you rightly describe as intolerable is not this and that local error or minor mistake. It is nothing less than the progress of civilization itself; nothing less than the intellectual advance and the mate- rial growth in which our century has been so preeminent, acting in a state of society based on private property in land; nothing less than the new gifts that in our time God has been showering on man, but which are being turned into scourges by man's " impious resistance to the benevolent intentions of his Creator."

The discoveries of science, the gains of invention, have given to us in this wonderful century more than has been given to men in any time before ; and, in a degree so rapidly accelerating as to suggest geometrical progres- sion, are placing in our hands new material powers. But with the benefit comes the obligation. In a civilization beginning to pulse with steam and electricity, where the sun paints pictures and the phonograph stores speech, it will not do to be merely as just as were our fathers. Intellectual advance and material advance require corre- sponding moral advance. Knowledge and power are neither good nor evil. They are not ends but means- evolving forces that if not controlled in orderly relations must take disorderly and destructive forms. The deep- ening pain, the increasing perplexity, the growing dis-

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