26 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
who has worked hard, lived sparingly, and invested his savings in a few slaves. Would you rob him of his earnings by liberating those slaves?" Or it was said: " Here is a poor widow ; all her husband has been able to leave her is a few negroes, the earnings of his hard toil. Would you rob the widow and the orphan by freeing these negroes ? " And because of this perversion of reason, this confounding of unjust property rights with just property rights, this acceptance of man's law as though it were'^God's law, there came on our nation a judgment of fire and blood.
The error of our people in thinking that what in itself was not rightfully property could become rightful prop- erty by purchase and sale is the same error into which your Holiness falls. It is not merely formally the same ; it is essentially the same. Private property in land, no less than private property in slaves, is a violation of the true rights of property. They are different forms of the same robbery; twin devices by which the perverted ingenuity of man has sought to enable the strong and the cunning to escape God's requirement of labor by forcing it on others.
What difference does it make whether I merely own the land on which another man must live or own the man himself? Am I not in the one case as much his master as in the other? Can I not compel him to work for me ? Can I not take to myself as much of the fruits of his labor; as fully dictate his actions? Have I not over him the power of life and death ? For to deprive a man of land is as certainly to kill him as to deprive him of blood by opening his veins, or of air by tightening a halter around his neck.
The essence of slavery is in empowering one man to obtain the labor of another without recompense. Private property in land does this as fully as chattel slavery.
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