OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIII. 47
themselves from want and misery in the uncertainties of this mortal life, to condemn the great masses of men to want and misery that the natural conditions of our mortal life do not entail ; to want and misery deeper and more wide-spread than exist among heathen savages? Under the regime of private property in land and in the richest countries not five per cent, of fathers are able at their death to leave anything substantial to their chil- dren, and probably a large majority do not leave enough to bury them! Some few children are left by their fathers richer than it is good for them to be, but the vast majority not only are left nothing by their fathers, but by the system that makes land private property are deprived of the bounty of their Heavenly Father; are compelled to sue others for permission to live and to work, and to toil all their lives for a pittance that often does not enable them to escape starvation and pauperism. What your Holiness is actually, though of course inad- vertently, urging, is that earthly fathers should assume the functions of the Heavenly Father. It is not the business of one generation to provide the succeeding generation "with all that is needful to enable them honorably to keep themselves from want and misery." That is God's business. We no more create our children than we create our fathers. It is God who is the Creator of each succeeding generation as fully as of the one that preceded it. And, to recall your own words (7), " Nature [God], therefore, owes to man a storehouse that shall never fail, the daily supply of his daily wants. And this he finds only in the inexhaustible fertility of the earth." What you are now assuming is, that it is the duty of men to provide for the wants of their children by appro- priating this storehouse and depriving other men's chil- dren of the unfailing supply that God has provided for all.
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