OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XHI. 61
or semi-governmental bureaus, would, if carried to full expression, mean Egyptian despotism. fcvVe differ from the socialists in our diagnosis of the evil and we differ from them as to remedies. We have no fear of capital, regarding it as the natural handmaiden of labor; we look on interest in itself as natural and just ; we would set no limit to accumulation, nor impose on the rich any burden that is not equally placed on the poor; we see no evil in competition, but deem unre- stricted competition to be as necessary to the health of the industrial and social organism as the free circulation of the blood is to the health of the bodily organism to be the agency whereby the fullest cooperation is to be secured. We would simply take for the community what belongs to the community, the value that attaches to land by the growth of the community ; leave sacredly to the individual all that belongs to the individual; and, treating necessary monopolies as functions of the state, abolish all restrictions and prohibitions save those re- quired for public health, safety, morals and convenience.
But the fundamental difference the difference I ask your Holiness specially to note, is in this: socialism in all its phases looks on the evils of our civilization as springing from the inadequacy or inharmony of natural relations, which must be artificially organized or improved. In its idea there devolves on the state the necessity of intelligently organizing the industrial rela- tions of men ; the construction, as it were, of a great machine whose complicated parts shall properly work together under the direction of human intelligence. This is the reason why socialism tends toward atheism. Failing to see the order and symmetry of natural law, it fails to recognize GodJ
On the other hand, we who call ourselves single-tax men (a name which expresses merely our practical prop-
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