Page:The Complete Works of Henry George Volume 3.djvu/267

 OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XTTT. 75

religious orders, but communism that uses the coercive power of the state to take rightful property by force from those who have, to give to those who have not ? For the state has no purse of Fortunatus ; the state cannot repeat the miracle of the loaves and fishes; all that the state can give, it must get by some form or other of the taking power. And whether it gives or lends money, or gives or lends credit, it cannot give to those who have not, without taking from those who have.

But aside from all this, any scheme of dividing up land while maintaining private property in land is futile. Small holdings cannot coexist with the treatment of land as private property where civilization is materially advancing and wealth augments. We may see this in the economic tendencies that in ancient times were the main cause that transformed world-conquering Italy from a land of small farms to a land of great estates. We may see it in the fact that while two centuries ago the majority of English farmers were owners of the land they tilled, tenancy has been for a long time the all but universal condition of the English farmer. And now the mighty forces of steam and electricity have come to urge concentration. It is in the United States that we may see on the largest scale how their power is operating to turn a nation of landowners into a nation of tenants. The principle is clear and irresistible. Material progress makes land more valuable, and when this increasing value is left to private owners land must pass from the ownership of the poor into the ownership of the rich, just as diamonds so pass when poor men find them. What the British government is attempting in Ireland is to build snow-houses in the Arabian desert! to plant bananas in Labrador !

There is one way, and only one way, in which working- people in our civilization may be secured a share in the land of their country, and that is the way that we pro-

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