OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XHI. 97
is right ? But your Holiness in the Encyclical expressly deprives the moral truths you state of all real bearing on the condition of labor, just as the American people, by their legalization of chattel slavery, used to deprive of all practical meaning the declaration they deem their funda- mental charter, and were accustomed to read solemnly on every national anniversary. That declaration asserts that "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal ; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights ; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." But what did this truth mean on the lips of men who asserted that one man was the rightful property of another man who had bought him j who asserted that the slave was robbing the master in running away, and that the man or the woman who helped the fugitive to escape, or even gave him a cup of cold water in Christ's name, was an acces- sory to theft, on whose head the penalties of the state should be visited ?
Consider the moral teachings of the Encyclical :
You tell us that God owes to man an inexhaustible storehouse which he finds only in the land. Yet you support a system that denies to the great majority of men all right of recourse to this storehouse.
You tell us that the necessity of labor is a consequence of original sin. Yet you support a system that exempts a privileged class from the necessity for labor and enables them to shift their share and much more than their share of labor on others.
You tell us that God has not created us for the perish- able and transitory things of earth, but has given us this world as a place of exile and not as our true country. Yet you tell us that some of the exiles have the exclusive right of ownership in this place of common exile, so that they may compel their fellow-exiles to pay them for
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