Page:The Complete Works of Henry George Volume 3.djvu/281

 OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XTTT. 89

of life, and yet conscious that there is a right to live, you assert the right of laborers to employment and their right to receive from their employers a certain indefinite wage. No such rights exist. No one has a right to demand employment of another, or to demand higher wages than the other is willing to give, or in any way to put pressure on another to make him raise such wages against his will. There can be no better moral justifica- tion for such demands on employers by working-men than there would be for employers demanding that working-men shall be compelled to work for them when they do not want to and to accept wages lower than they are willing to take. Any seeming justification springs from a prior wrong, the denial to working-men of their natural rights, and can in the last analysis rest only on that supreme dictate of self-preservation that under extraordinary circumstances makes pardonable what in itself is theft, or sacrilege or even murder.

A fugitive slave with the bloodhounds of his pursuers baying at his heels would in true Christian morals be held blameless if he seized the first horse he came across, even though to take it he had to knock down the rider. But this is not to justify horse-stealing as an ordinary means of traveling.

When his disciples were hungry Christ permitted them to pluck corn on the Sabbath day. But he never denied the sanctity of the Sabbath by asserting that it was under ordinary circumstances a proper time to gather corn.

He justified David, who when pressed by hunger com- mitted what ordinarily would be sacrilege, by taking from the temple the loaves of proposition. But in this he was far from saying that the robbing of temples was a proper way of getting a living.

In the Encyclical however you commend the appli- cation to the ordinary relations of life, under normal conditions, of principles that in ethics are only to be

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