OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIH. 65
the owners of land, without at all benefiting the mere laborers. In no event can those possessed of the mere ordinary power to labor, a power utterly useless without the means necessary to labor, keep more of their earnings than enough to enable them to live.
How true this is we may see in the facts of to-day. In our own time invention and discovery have enormously increased the productive power of labor, and at the same time greatly reduced the cost of many things necessary to the support of the laborer. Have these improvements anywhere raised the earnings of the mere laborer? Have not their benefits mainly gone to the owners of land enormously increased land values ?
I say mainly, for some part of the benefit has gone to the cost of monstrous standing armies and warlike prep- arations; to the payment of interest on great public debts; and, largely disguised as interest on fictitious capital, to the owners of monopolies other than that of land. But improvements that would do away with these wastes would not benefit labor; they would simply increase the profits of landowners. Were standing armies and all their incidents abolished, were all monop- olies other than that of land done away with, were governments to become models of economy, were the profits of speculators, of middlemen, of all sorts of exchangers saved, were every one to become so strictly honest that no policemen, no courts, no prisons, no pre- cautions against dishonesty would be needed the result would not differ from that which has followed the increase of productive power.
Nay, would not these very blessings bring starvation to many of those who now manage to live? Is it not true that if there were proposed to-day, what all Chris- tian men ought to pray for, the complete disbandment of all the armies of Europe, the greatest fears would be
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