OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XHI. 51
charity offers. I should like to ask your Holiness to consider how the great majority of men in such countries have no interest whatever in what they are taught to call their native land, for which they are told that on occa- sions it is their duty to fight or to die. What right, for instance, have the majority of your countrymen in the land of their birth? Can they live in Italy outside of a prison or a poorhouse except as they buy the privilege from some of the exclusive owners of Italy ? Cannot an Englishman, an American, an Arab or a Japanese do as much! May not what was said centuries ago by Tibe- rius Gracchus be said to-day: "Men of Rome! you are called the lords of the world, yet have no right to a square foot of its soil! The mid beasts have their dens, but the soldiers of Italy have only icater and air! "
What is true of Italy is true of the civilized world is becoming increasingly true. It is the inevitable effect as civilization progresses of private property in land.
8. That the right to possess private property in land is from nature, not from man; that the state has no right to abolish it, and that to take the value of landownership in taxation would be unjust and cruel to the private owner. (51.)
This, like much else that your Holiness says, is masked in the use of the indefinite terms " private property " and " private owner "a want of precision in the use of words that has doubtless aided in the confusion of your own thought. But the context leaves no doubt that by pri- vate property you mean private property in land, and by private owner, the private owner of land.
The contention, thus made, that private property in land is from nature, not from man, has no other basis than the confounding of ownership with possession and the ascription to property in land of what belongs to its contradictory, property in the proceeds of labor. You
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