The Condition of Labour: An Open Letter to Pope Leo XIII

Editorial note

In May 1891, Pope Leo XIII issued Rerum Novarum — one of the most important documents in Catholic social teaching — addressing the condition of labour, condemning socialism, and defending private property, including property in land. Henry George, whose movement had by then spread internationally, considered Rerum Novarum a direct challenge and a dangerous confusion of two fundamentally different kinds of property: man-made goods (legitimately private) and land (the gift of God to all people).

George spent several months composing The Condition of Labour: An Open Letter to Pope Leo XIII, published in 1891. It is among the most rigorous and eloquent statements of his philosophy, arguing that the Church's own natural-law tradition — the tradition of the Fathers, of Thomas Aquinas, of the Scholastics — supports the Georgist position, not the defence of land monopoly. It challenged the Pope to apply the moral principles of Christianity consistently, and insisted that the land question is not a side issue but the central question of social justice.

The letter attracted wide attention, including a response from Cardinal Manning, and helped open a decades-long dialogue between Georgist thought and Catholic social teaching.

Public domain status: Published 1891; Henry George died 1897. Fully public domain in all jurisdictions.

The Condition of Labour: An Open Letter to Pope Leo XIII

— Henry George, 1891

Introduction

Your Holiness — The Encyclical on the Condition of Labour, which you have recently issued in the name of the Catholic Church, calls for a respectful answer. I am moved to make that answer, not as a controversy, but as an act of duty toward those great principles of justice on which, as I believe, the welfare of mankind depends.

I speak as one who, though not a Catholic, reverences the Catholic Church, and who believes that on the great questions of justice and right, the instinct of Christianity, rightly followed, must lead to truth. And I speak on a subject which I have given the best years of my life to studying — the condition of the labouring classes and the causes of their poverty.

Where we agree

Let me begin with what we agree upon.

Your Holiness condemns socialism. I also condemn socialism — that form of socialism, at least, which would make the state the universal employer, the universal owner, the universal regulator of industry. I agree with the encyclical that such a system would destroy individual liberty, would sap the foundations of the family, and would end in despotism.

Your Holiness affirms the right of private property. I also affirm the right of private property — to all that man makes or creates by his own labour. The house a man builds, the crops he grows, the goods he fashions — all these are his, absolutely and legitimately, as the products of his own exertion.

Your Holiness calls upon the state to protect the poor, to restrain the greed of the rich, to ensure that labour receives its just reward. In this, too, I agree entirely. The social order as it exists is profoundly unjust, and it is the duty of both Church and State to correct that injustice.

Where we differ: the distinction between land and capital

But here the agreement ends. Because Rerum Novarum commits, I believe, a fundamental error — an error that has the most grave practical consequences. It confounds two fundamentally different kinds of property: the property that man creates by his labour, and the property in land, which no man created.

Your Holiness writes: "The fact that God gave the earth for the use and enjoyment of the whole human race can in no wise be a bar to the rightful ownership of private property." And again: "Man… ought to have not merely the fruits of the earth, but also the very soil, inasmuch as from the produce of the earth he has to lay by provision for the future."

But with great respect, this reasoning confounds two quite different things. The fruit of the earth — what man produces from the soil — is legitimately the property of him who produced it. But the soil itself, the earth itself, was not made by man. It was created by God, and, as your own tradition teaches, given to mankind in common.

Thomas Aquinas taught that human beings have a natural right to the things necessary for life. He taught, following tradition, that the natural law gives all men a common right to the earth, and that private property in land is a human institution, justified only because, under ordinary conditions, it is more productive. He did not teach that land could become the absolute private property of individuals, foreclosing the common right of all.

The Church Fathers were even clearer. St. Ambrose wrote: "God has ordered all things to be produced that there should be food in common for all, and that the earth should be the common possession of all." St. Chrysostom called it robbery to deprive others of what the earth offers to all.

It is not socialism to distinguish between what God created and what man created. It is justice.

The root of poverty

Here is the truth that your encyclical misses, and which I beg your Holiness to consider: The poverty of the labouring masses is not due to the wickedness of the rich, nor to the selfishness of employers, nor primarily to any of the causes that social reformers commonly identify. It is due to the fact that the earth — the source from which all wealth must ultimately be drawn — has been parcelled out as private property, and that those who have no land must pay for the privilege of living and working upon the earth.

As population grows, as communities improve, as public works are built and civilisation advances — land values rise. But this rise does not go to those who have done the work of improvement. It goes to the landowners. The value created by the community is appropriated by those who own the ground.

This is the systematic cause of poverty. This is why wages in the most advanced countries tend, not to rise with advancing civilisation, but to remain at the minimum at which labourers will work. This is why, amid the wonderful productive powers of modern industry, millions live in want.

The remedy: the common ownership of land values

I am not proposing to confiscate private property or to abolish the family. I am proposing that the community collect, for common use, the annual value of land — the rent that arises from the community itself, from the presence and activities of the people, not from any action of the landowner.

This is not a novel proposal. It is an application, to modern conditions, of the oldest principle of justice: that what God gave to all belongs to all.

The practical method is simple: Levy a tax — it might in time be the only tax — sufficient to collect the annual rental value of all land. Leave to the possessor of land all the fruits of his own labour and capital improvement. Take only what he holds by virtue of his monopoly of a gift of nature.

The result would be as if the earth were held in common — every person would have equal access to the opportunities for labour — but without the cumbrous machinery of state administration of industry. Individual enterprise would be as free as now. The family and private accumulation would be as secure. But poverty, systematic poverty, would be abolished — because every human being, having access to the earth, would have access to the source of all wealth.

An appeal to Christian conscience

Your Holiness, the teaching of Jesus Christ is, at its heart, incompatible with the system by which a few hold the earth as their private property while millions are landless. "The poor ye have always with you" — but this was not a prophecy of God's will, but an observation of human institutions.

The early Church understood this. "The earth is the Lord's," sang the Psalmist. "The land shall not be sold for ever," commanded the Mosaic law. The Jubilee — the periodic restoration of land to those dispossessed — was not a curiosity of ancient legislation, but the expression of an inalienable principle: that the gifts of God cannot rightfully become the permanent private property of a class, to the exclusion of the rest.

I am not asking your Holiness to endorse a political program. I am asking only this: that the Catholic Church, which has always stood for the poor against the powerful, should not lend its authority to the defence of a monopoly that is the primary cause of the poverty it deplores.

Let the great encyclical be followed by another — one that applies to the land question the same rigorous moral analysis that Rerum Novarum applies to the labour question. Let the Church declare that the earth, as God's gift to all mankind, cannot be rightfully held as the private property of the few, to the exclusion of the many. That declaration would do more to alleviate the condition of labour than any programme of legislation or charity that has ever been proposed.

I lay this respectfully before your Holiness, and before all who read it, in the conviction that truth, fearlessly faced, is the best servant of justice.

— Henry George, 1891