monopoly, and the so-called land question deserves all the attention it is receiving."1

Mr. Rae, in a critical and comprehensive survey of the principles of Socialism, says that when the increase of population compels a resort to inferior soils for subsistence, "It becomes the duty of society to see that the most productive use possible is being made of its land, and to introduce such a mode of tenure as seems most likely effectually to secure that end." 2

Prince Bismarck said that the spread of Socialism in the agricultural district of Lauenburg need not excite surprise, because "the laborers could never hope to acquire the smallest spot of ground as their own possession, and were kept in a state of dependence on the gentry and the peasant proprietor."

If this means anything, it means that, when any class of citizens is so shut out from its interest in the land as to be dependent on land-owners, it is enslaved.

Carlyle once said to an American, "The reason why your laboring people are so happy is because you have a vast deal of land for a very few people." The want of land will render laborers unhappy. It is difficult to see how our Republic can guarantee the right to the "pursuit of happiness," while it legalizes the monopoly of land. The people are speaking plainly about monopoly.

By all parties the monopolists of the necessaries of life are called thieves and robbers. Land is a necessity of life, and so also are other means of production, and when Socialists call the monopolizers of these thieves and robbers, we need not be too critical.

The atmosphere of this question is economically wholesome and morally bracing. The wind is blowing in the right direction. The sky is red, and it will be fair weather to-morrow. Private capital has been a necessary condition of a progressive civilization.

In the historical social evolution, however, great and radical changes take place.

Scarcely a feature of social life in the days of Moses was discernible in the time of Christ. Still greater is the contrast between the dawn of the Christian era and the present day. Either of the causes of Socialism formerly considered is a gigantic Gulf Stream running through the social organism. All of them combined have produced, almost within a century, a complete metamorphosis of the social structure. Nothing remains but the few fundamental and immutable principles of human conduct.

The discovery of these principles and their application to the changed and changing conditions of human life, is the problem of Sociological science. The absoluteness of private property is not one of these immutable principles.

The Scriptural sanctions of private property, so far as they relate to tenure, are not in their nature mandatory but directory, and are made with reference to the then existing and primitive condition of society. Ferdinand Lassalle, whom Ex-President Theodore D. Woolsey characterizes as "a man of splendid endowments," published a volume "to show that certain rights of vast importance - such as property and inheritance are really historical and not jural; that is, they arose in circumstances that justified their recognition, but that certain other circumstances might require their abolition." 1

Private property may be right where land is plenty and population sparse, and wrong when all the land is appropriated and population dense. Certain it is that God never intended that the time should come when private property should prevent his earth from responding to the hungry mouths and willing hands of any of his children; on the contrary, he says, what is utterly inconsistent with the current idea of property: "The profit of the earth is for all." 2 When we reflect upon the cruel land monopolies of Europe, where the toiling millions have no right to the soil except by sufferance of the rich land-owner, and realize

1 As quoted in " Communism and Socialism," p. 175.
2 Eccles. v. 9.

that the same land laws and social tendencies are rapidly producing this iniquitous state of affairs in this country, we are forced to believe that, while private capital is not literal theft, it now involves great social injustice, is antiscriptural and especially hostile to the New Testament doctrines of love and brotherhood.

The well-to-do in society have no inore right to monopolize the land, as against the poor and weak, than a syndicate of redeemed spirits would have to fence in against other saints the crystal rivers, waving trees, and golden-paved streets of heaven.

We are told that in our country at least there is no land question; we have land enough and to spare. Is it wise to build up institutions on a false foundation, because the conditions of mischief are, for a time, delayed? Within ten or fifteen years all our land will have become private property. Every day swells the ranks of the landless, and hence, in a free country, dangerous classes.

To dismiss this question, therefore, as of no importance, because we have land enough for the present, is to sit down beside a bomb-shell in composure, because it has a long fuse. The first step to be taken in this reform is to substitute in the popular mind, the Christian for the Roman idea of property.

The pagan idea has been handed down from century to century, and is wrought into the whole fabric of society. It envelops us like an atmosphere. There is scarcely a relation in human life that does not suffer from its polluted and polluting breath. It is the one relic of barbarism that has defied Christian civilization. But the time has come when the principle must be abandoned. The world has outgrown it. Society will no longer tolerate it.

If men are brothers, private property cannot be absolute. Dr. Washington Gladden, in a candid and instructive review of the social questions in their relation to Christianity, says, "It is plain that there was in Jerusalem a voluntary consecration, by each member of the infant church, of his property to the supply of the actual needs of the brotherhood. That is no doubt the Christian rule." 1

1 "Applied Christianity," p. 16.

The italics are ours. If this is the Christian rule, then the existing order is far from being Christian. Socialism demands that the Christian rule shall be adopted; that capital shall be socialized in accordance with the new idea of right and social justice now prevailing.

A standard American author on real property says the right of property "is so far limited that its use may be regulated from time to time by law, so as to prevent its being inconsistent with the rights of the community."1 What are rights? Will it be questioned that they are more and different and more sacred than when private property first took form and root amid pagan inequalities and cruelties?

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Equality of rights," said Charles Sumner, "is the first of all rights." If God has given life to every individual, he has given a right to the means of sustaining it. These means are, the earth with its resources, the air and water; and these no man may monopolize.

The same is true of water.

Should a syndicate of scientists succeed in exhausting the air near the surface of the earth, bottle it up, and demand a price for it, which they assuredly would do if they could, how long would they be allowed to hold it? Just long enough for men to want one breath. Why? Because it is a natural resource essential to life in which all men have a right. Why not of earth as well as air and water, for land is equally essential to life? In the same sense that the earth is the Lord's, it is not the landlords. When, in the evolution of society, other means of production and of sustaining life become related to society, as is the land, they must be regarded in the same manner. Ownership is also conditioned on the paramount right of the State.

The present industrial system sprang up when the opinion prevailed that the powerful had divine right to maintain themselves against and at the expense of the weak. Democracy has discovered that the State, politically considered, is the people; but it is yet too fresh from mo

1 "Washburn on Real Estate," p. 2.

narchical ideas to think of the State, industrially considered, as the people, as society itself, having the same lien upon private property as the State.

These two claims upon all property, viz., the claim of God as a common Father and of the State as all the people, have not yet been reduced to common terms and applied to industrial life; therefore the social conflict. It is between an economic aristocracy and a political democracy, between industrial tyranny and social liberty, between plutocracy and theocracy, between the Roman idea of property as a subjective right and the Christian idea as a trust imposing duties. But we are told that this Christian idea of property is right in the abstract, but it is not practical, it is ideality.

So is Christianity itself ideality. It demands the abolition of sin in every soul and the reign of righteousness in every rill of human society, and it will be satisfied with nothing less. Time-serving men charge it with impracticality and sneer at its Utopian scheme. But its ideality is its crown and its glory. Ideality is God, and God will ultimately win.

The practical is often variable in quantity and destitute of moral quality. The ideal is divine and perfect. What is should always fear and tremble before what ought to be.

All social institutions and all human activities that do not have ideality as their Alpha and Omega are belittling to the soul and false to the Creator.

We have now indicated the principles which must be recognized and applied in modifying the present tenure of capital, so as to meet the advancing conditions of society in the growth and spread among the people, of that divine trinity of principles announced by Christ and sanctioned by the universal Christian consciousness, liberty, equality, and fraternity.

These principles now demand that private capital, which is the exploitation of the wage-worker, which enables the rich to take toll of his flesh and blood, and which is thus a social crime, shall be abolished, so far at least as may be necessary to secure social justice.