Page:The Complete Works of Henry George Volume 3.djvu/262

 70 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.

content for which, as you truly say, some remedy must "be found and quickly found, mean nothing less than that forces of destruction swifter and more terrible than those that have shattered every preceding civilization are already menacing ours that if it does not quickly rise to a higher moral level ; if it does not become in deed as in word a Christian civilization, on the wall of its splendor must flame the doom of Babylon: "Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting ! "

One false assumption prevents you from seeing the real cause and true significance of the facts that have prompted your Encyclical. And it fatally fetters you when you seek a remedy.

You state that you approach the subject with confi- dence, yet in all that greater part of the Encyclical (19-67) devoted to the remedy, while there is an abun- dance of moral reflections and injunctions, excellent in themselves but dead and meaningless as you apply them, the only definite practical proposals for the improvement of the condition of labor are :

1. That the state should step in to prevent overwork, to restrict the employment of women and children, to secure in workshops conditions not unfavorable to health and morals, and, at least where there is danger of in- sufficient wages provoking strikes, to regulate wages (39-40).

2. That it should encourage the acquisition of property (in land) by working-men (50-51).

3. That working-men's associations should be formed (52-67).

These remedies so far as they go are socialistic, and though the Encyclical is not without recognition of the individual character of man and of the priority of the individual and the family to the state, yet the whole

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