OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIH. 63
that it is beyond the power of human ingenuity to devise any way by which the evils born of the injustice that robs men of their birthright can be removed otherwise than by doing justice, by opening to all the bounty that God has provided for all.
Since man can live only on land and from land, since land is the reservoir of matter and force from which man's body itself is taken, and on which he must draw for all that he can produce, does it not irresistibly follow that to give the land in ownership to some men and to deny to others all right to it is to divide mankind into the rich and the poor, the privileged and the helpless? Does it not follow that those who have no rights to the use of land can live only by selling their power to labor to those who own the land? Does it not follow that what the socialists call " the iron law of wages," what the political economists term "the tendency of wages to a minimum," must take from the landless masses the mere laborers, who of themselves have no power to use their labor all the benefits of any possible advance or improvement that does not alter this unjust division of land ? For having no power to employ themselves, they must, either as labor-sellers or as land-renters, compete with one another for permission to labor. This competi- tion with one another of men shut out from God's inex- haustible storehouse has no limit but starvation, and must ultimately force wages to their lowest point, the point at which life can just be maintained and reproduc- tion carried on.
This is not to say that all wages must fall to this point, but that the wages of that necessarily largest stratum of laborers who have only ordinary knowledge, skill and aptitude must so fall. The wages of special classes, who are fenced off from the pressure of competition by pecu- liar knowledge, skill or other causes, may remain above
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