24 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
as he pleases, the power of appointing to the cure of souls, and the value of these legal rights of presentation is said to be no less than 17,000,000.
Or again : Slaves were universally treated as property by the customs and laws of the classical nations, and were so acknowledged in Europe long after the accep- tance of Christianity. At the beginning of this century there was no Christian nation that did not, in her col- onies at least, recognize property in slaves, and slave- ships crossed the seas under Christian flags. In the United States, little more than thirty years ago, to buy a man gave the same legal ownership as to buy a horse, and in Mohammedan countries law and custom yet make the slave the property of his captor or purchaser.
Yet your Holiness, one of the glories of whose pontifi- cate is the attempt to break up slavery in its last strong- holds, will not contend that the moral sanction that attaches to property in things produced by labor can, or ever could, apply to property in slaves.
Your use, in so many passages of your Encyclical, of the inclusive term "property" or "private" property, of which in morals nothing can be either affirmed or denied, makes your meaning, if we take isolated sen- tences, in many places ambiguous. But reading it as a whole, there can be no doubt of your intention that private property in land shall be understood when you speak merely of private property. With this interpreta- tion, I find that the reasons you urge for private property in land are eight. Let us consider them in order of pres- entation. You urge:
1. That what is bought with rightful property is rightful property. (5.)*
- To facilitate references the paragraphs of the Encyclical are
indicated by number.
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