Spiritual Economics:

A Plea for Christianity in Action

John Emery McLean

[An essay published by the Henry George Foundation of America, 1928]

It would be thoroughly consistent to head this chapter "Private Ownership of Public Property," for it should be obvious to any candid and reasoning mind that there is a vital difference between things made by man and things provided by the Creator; in other words, between the products of human labor and the bounties of Nature. Also, it should be just as evident that God (if His impartiality and equal love for all mankind are conceded) would not and did not create any material thing for the exclusive benefit of any special individual or group. We are undoubtedly justified in deducing the Divine intent from these objective facts, and hence in affirming that the right of access to the raw materials of the planet, in the acquirement of what is essential to existence, is a common right. Our custom, therefore, of treating this terrestrial storehouse as the private domain of a minority of its living inhabitants, and of certifying such exclusive ownership under the forms of man-made law, is a clear defiance and perversion of natural law.

Equally perversive of a plain law of Nature is the Communistic demand for public ownership of private property. What any man produces by his own industry is as rightfully and exclusively his as the two hands he employed in the process. For this assertion there is Divine authority. When Jehovah declared that "the land is mine" the claim was obviously based upon the fact that He created it. But the "ownership" complex was at one time a mania that legalized even property in human beings. And while chattel slavery is still existent in effect in every community that refuses to recognize the above distinction between the sources of material wealth, there is evidence that it will eventually follow into oblivion the curse of human slavery.

Loose and inaccurate statements made from the pulpit throughout the years have contributed much to its decline as an educational influence. For example: The Rev. J. Lowrey Fendrich, Jr., pastor of the largest Presbyterian church in Brooklyn, N. Y., recently preached a sermon on the parable recorded in St. Luke xii., 16, which begins: "The ground of a certain rich man brought forth plentifully." Commenting upon the man's self-satisfaction derived from his accumulation of material wealth, the minister said: "God gave him all that he possessed -- his acres, the rich loam," etc. This assertion is quite erroneous. God did not give those acres to him, but to all mankind. He did not give them even to a "certain" generation. They were created for the use of successive generations, and the "certain rich man" had no more cause to be grateful for a special gratuity from their Creator than a Rockefeller has to thank a discriminating and partial God for his burdensome millions.

For his legal and exclusive ownership of the fertile ground, the parabolic man was indebted to the stupidity of his fellows, precisely as in our modern day the people of Great Britain permit Lord Iveagh to "own" a tract of 23,000 acres of tillable soil and to utilize it solely as a pheasant preserve. Other huge estates are devoted to the propagation of "game" birds and animals for the pleasure derived by the owners of the land and their "sporting" friends from the slaughter of God's innocent and beautiful creatures. While this situation continues, without effective protest from the English people, there are more than a million unemployed persons "registered" in London, and the Church of England hierarchy and the British Parliament engage in a time-wasting, acrimonious, hair-splitting contest over the wording of a revision of their ritualistic prayers! "Missionaries can explain their religion," the Muskogee Phoenix rises from the ashes of despair to remark; "the hard part is to explain their civilization."

The contention that the natural resources of any country should be regarded and administered as public property can be sustained on other grounds than those of logic and equity. Cited herewith are a few of the recorded opinions of much abler minds than the writer's:

Thomas Jefferson: "The earth belongs in usufruct to the living; the dead have neither powers nor rights over it. The portion occupied by any individual ceases to be his when he himself ceases to be, and reverts to society."

Blackstone: "There is no foundation in Nature, or in natural law, why a set of words upon parchment should convey the dominion of land; why the son should have the right to exclude his fellow-creatures from a determinate spot of ground, because his father had done so before him; or why the occupier of a particular field, when lying upon his deathbed and no longer able to maintain possession, should be entitled to tell the rest of the world which of them should enjoy it after him."

Thomas Paine: "The earth in its natural, uncultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be, the common property of the human race. In that state every man would have been born to property. He would have been a joint life proprietor with the rest in the property of the soil, and in all its natural productions, vegetable and animal. Cultivation is one of the greatest natural improvements ever made by human invention. But the landed monopoly that began with it has produced the greatest evil. In advocating the case of the persons thus dispossessed, it is a right, and not a charity, that I am pleading for."

Justice Longfield; "Property in land differs in its origin from property in any commodity produced by human labor; the product of labor naturally belongs to the laborer who produced it, but the same argument does not apply to land, which is not produced by labor, but is the gift of the Creator of the world to mankind. Every argument used to give an ethical foundation for the exclusive right of property in land has a latent fallacy."

John Stuart Mill: "The essential principle of property being to assure to all persons what they have produced by their labor and accumulated by their abstinence, this principle cannot apply to what is not the product of labor, the raw material of the earth."

Robert G. Ingersoll: "No man should be allowed n> own any land that he does not use. The land belongs to tin-children of Nature. Every child is entitled to his share in the land, and he should not be compelled to beg the privilege to work the soil. It is not to our interest to have a few landlords and millions of tenants. For men who cannot live and move and have their being without the leave of others cannot be equally free with others. The doctrine that men are equally entitled to the use of the earth is consistent with the highest state of civilization and need cause no serious revolution in existing arrangements."

The truth of Ingersoll's concluding sentence lies in the fact that there is only a technical difference between ownership and possession. They are not, however, interdependent. To make the latter secure, permanent and exclusive, the former Is unessential. Our system of injecting the principle of chattel proprietorship into the occupancy of every piece of "owned" ground is the outcome of a stupid fear of contingent dispossession and a selfish disregard of common human rights, plus an imagined expediency in the practice of collecting public revenues by the taxation of every other valuable thing in sight.*

"When truth is revealed, let custom give place; let no man prefer custom before reason and truth," wrote St. Augustine. But the system has been so long in vogue that it is accepted as inevitable, and many labored but specious attempts to justify it have been made by brilliant writers, editors and speakers, including a few venal university professors who prostitute their talents in the service of monopoly. Our legal codes, our industrial structure, our fiscal machinery, our legislation, our social ethics, the ramifications of every line of business, commerce and transportation, as well as our conventional and standardized educational methods and curricula, and even some of our religions are adjusted to its warping and cramping limitations. Yet its essential injustice and almost criminal folly are not wholly ignored by publicists and educators with a conscience illumined by intelligence.

Speaking of London's distinguished landlords, the Daily New of that city says editorially:

Here is the annual tribute levied by seven peers on the land values of the metropolis: The Duke of Westminster: 3,000,000 pounds; Lord Howard de Walden: 2,900,000 pounds; The Duke of Bedford: 2,260,000 pounds; Lord Portman: 1,890,000 pounds; Lord Northampton: 1,600,000 pounds; The Duke of Norfolk: 1,500,000 pounds; Earl Cadogen: 1,600,000 pounds. Now, what have these peers done to create this enormous wealth? The question answers itself. They have done less than nothing. Their only task has been to receive the torrent of gold which the toil of London has poured into their laps. It is the people whose industry has created these values. It is they who have made the roads and laid the sewers and built the tramways. It is they who have raised the factories and shops and filled them with the hum of industry. It is they who have borne the crushing burden of the rates that have created the values. And the dukes, over whom the Times sheds its foolish tears, have taken all the plunder and have given nothing but blankets in return. They have not even contributed a penny to the rates. Nor is that all. At the expiry of the lease of houses that others have built they have appropriated even the buildings, and, as in the Gorringe case, levied new and enormous tribute on the industry of those who have made those premises valuable. That society should have tolerated this wrong so long, that industry should have been able to stagger along under such a burden, is well-nigh incredible.

The Duke of Northumberland, who draws $375,000 a year from his "mining royalties" alone, recently received a letter from a Labor M. P. containing this assertion: "A person can only claim that to be his private property if he has produced it by his own labor, or has exchanged something he did produce, or rendered some labor service for it, or had the property freely bequeathed to him by some one who had a rightful claim. The title deed to property is based on the labor effort that established it." His Grace replied in part as follows (in the third person, of course) :

The Duke of Northumberland ventures to point out that no workingman capable of serious thinking would assert that the title deed to property is based on a labor effort which established it -- an assertion which is as contrary to common sense as it is to every law, human and divine. Moreover, if it were true, it would justify, not the confiscation of the land-owner's wealth, which is the product of the labor, public spirit and devotion to duty of many generations of land-owners, but of the Labor party funds, which are the product of legalized extortion and organized deception. Nor would any educated workingman ask the Duke such a question as to whether he had made the land. He would know that the prairie value of land is nil, and that its present value has been created mainly by the labor, the enterprise, intelligence and capital of the land-owner. Nor would such a workingman query the obvious truth that the King, as head of the state, was entitled to grant it to those best able to look after it -- a denial which evinces total ignorance of the historical and ethical foundations of civilized society. Above all, no workingman, capable of reasoning at all, would assert that the robbery of the land-owner would not impoverish the state. Every board-school boy knows that it would result in national bankruptcy in a week, owing to the destruction of the whole credit system of the country and of security for all property of every kind.

There is not the slightest doubt that the noble Duke was absolutely sincere in making the above statement. It is in full accord with British tradition, education and governmental procedure for many generations -- ingrained in the very fibre of British life and institutions. It is equally true that there is scarcely a bishop of the Church of England who would hesitate to applaud him for his candor in refuting a member of the "rabble" and compliment him on his logic. Here we have a partial explanation of the increasing numbers of the "unchurched" and the growing membership of the British Labor party; but the facts reveal the crystallization of medieval sentiment that true liberalists are called upon to dissolve before any progress can be made toward the alleviation of the appalling poverty of Great Britain, in which two or three families may often be found living together in a single cellar while many thousands of fertile acres are held out of productive use by titled owners as "hunting preserves."

Yet we on this side of the ocean cannot consistently point the finger of scorn at British Bourbonism, for we are guilty of the same form of injustice and legally enforced inequality -- the same stupid adherence to principles of economic administration that are not only dishonest but a blasphemous betrayal of the people's heritage of the right to life and liberty. Not long ago the government of the republic of Bolivia conceded to a British syndicate, for exploitation of its agricultural, timber, oil and mineral resources, fifty million acres (120,000 square miles -- an area greater than the United Kingdom itself). And in our own country a little negro girl, eighteen years old, living near Muskogee, Okla., has suddenly become "worth a million and a half dollars" through the discovery of petroleum on the supposedly worthless land she "owned" in that vicinity -- thus making her the richest colored girl in the United States; while the world's wealthiest people, per capita, are our own 1,500 Osage Indians, who have received during the last decade about $180,000,000 for gas and oil from their Oklahoma lands.

That natural bounties can be so manipulated under the forms of law, and with even the tacit approval of the American pulpit, is an indictment of our national conscience as well as of our intelligence. It is a libel on our Christian pretensions, and so long as the system is allowed to exist our palliative methods of coping with the twin problems of poverty and crime will continue to reveal their futility.

It is true that some excellent church-members who have amassed many millions through exploitation of one or more of their country's natural resources soothe their consciences by declaring that they are only "trustees" of this wealth, and imply that, in dispensing a liberal percentage of it in charity and other forms of benevolence, they are really tin; chosen agents of God. It was out of the same smug reservoir of modesty that the pharisaical doctrine of the "divine right of kings" was brought forth for the doping of the popular mind into the belief that God is, after all, a "respecter of persons" who are really superior to the common herd. But all such attempts to involve the Deity in rulerships that mean oppression and economic injustice are destined to fail -- when our impartial Creator shall have been rescued from His "friends."

Judge Henry Neil, author of our mothers' pension laws, observing women in the Chicago Juvenile Court become hysterical because children they could not support were being sent away to institutions, has uttered a plea that our public schools provide proper and adequate physical nourishment for the little ones attending them. "Of the 26,000,000 American school children," says he, "fifty per cent, are physically deficient. And the physical defects are due principally to under-nourishment. These defects and the influence of improper nutrition make children dull and retard their advancement, handicapping them for life. They arc not given the food properties they need. Especially lacking in their diets are lime salts; hence the large number of children with bad teeth. Adenoids, goitre, rickets-these troubles are traceable to malnutrition."

The condition deplored by this sympathetic judge is but symptomatic of a much more deep-seated malady, as was the revelation in 1916 that one-third of our conscripted and volunteering young men were found physically unfit for military service. The disorder is the outcome of involuntary poverty, which affects not only fifty per cent, of American school children but a vast majority of our adults, and is attributable to their enforced denial of access to natural opportunities. These are all embraced in the single word land, of which Henry George gives us this pithy definition:

Land is the habitation of man, the storehouse upon which he must draw for all his needs, the material to which his labor must be applied for the supply of all his desires; for even the products of the sea cannot be taken, the light of the sun enjoyed, or any of the forces of Nature utilized, without the use of land or its products. On the land we are born, from it we live, and to it we return again -- children of the soil as truly as the blade of grass or the flowers in the field.

NOTE

"No less than 1,500 towns and villages in Germany still own, and have owned right down from the Middle Ages, so much common land that their inhabitants pay neither rates nor taxes. Five hundred of these townships and villages derive so great a rental from their lands that they are able in addition to pay every citizen on, New Year's Pay & bonus of from 5 to 20 pounds as his share of the surplus revenue. Further, the fact that crime is considerably less in those counties which possess the greatest percentage of common land, and that wages are considerably higher than in those districts possessing no common land, makes it very manifest how much of wisdom lies in the ancient law of our Teutonic ancestors that the land belongs to the people and can never by any moral right become private property."-R. Okel, in the Westminster Review.