LVTFan's Blog

The Earth-for-All Calendar: Undecimber 1 -- Hildebrand - Pope Gregory the Great

The soil was given to rich and poor in common. Wherefore, O ye rich, do you unjustly claim it for yourselves alone?

—Hildebrand, Pope Gregory the Great.

(See also March 11)

Hmmm.  Googling this, it appears to be from St. Ambrose.  (See December 21 for another):

Upton Sinclair, ed. (1878–1968). The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest.  1915.

The Voice of the Early Church. V.

By St. Ambrose

(Latin; 340?–397)

HOW far, O rich, do you extend your senseless avarice? Do you intend to be the sole inhabitants of the earth? Why do you drive out the fellow sharers of nature, and claim it all for yourselves? The earth was made for all, rich and poor, in common. Why do you rich claim it as your exclusive right? The soil was given to the rich and poor in common—wherefore, oh, ye rich, do you unjustly claim it for yourselves alone? Nature gave all things in common for the use of all; usurpation created private rights. Property hath no rights. The earth is the Lord’s, and we are his offspring. The pagans hold earth as property. They do blaspheme God.

 

The Earth-for-All Calendar is going into Undecimber

Well, we've completed a year of the "Earth-for-All Calendar."  (See the original explanatory post here.)  There have been about 430 quotes, all pointing in the direction of the wisdom and justice of the earth being for ALL.

Ernest Crosby, after publishing the book, turned up an additional month's worth of quotes, which I will publish as Undecimber (with honors to my Latin teachers, Mrs. Yost, Miss Deitz, Mr. Ferry and Miss Basehore!   My source for the thirteenth month is the July 15, 1902, edition of The Single Tax Review.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: December 31 -- Exodus, Carlyle and Woolman

The earth is the Lord's.

— EXODUS, IX., 29

The soil of all countries belongs evermore in a very considerable degree to the Almighty Maker.

— THOMAS CARLYLE, Past and Present, Book III., Chap. 8

As He who first founded the earth was then the true proprietor of it, so He still remains, and though He hath given it to the children of men, so that multitudes of people have had their sustenance from it while they continued here, yet He hath never alienated it, but His right is as good as at first; nor can any apply the increase of their possessions contrary to universal love, nor dispose of lands in a way which they know tends to exalt some by oppressing others without being justly chargeable with usurpation.

—JOHN WOOLMAN, A Word of Remembrance and Caution to the Rich, (1771), Sec. X.  

The Earth-for-All Calendar: December 30 -- Dove

If, then, successive generations of men cannot have their fractional share of the actual soil (including mines, etc.) how can the division of the advantages of the natural earth be effected? By the division of its annual value or rent; that is, by making the rent of the soil the common property of the nation. That is (as the taxation is the common property of the State), by taking the whole of the taxes out of the rents of the soil, and thereby abolishing all other kinds of taxation whatever. And thus all industry would be absolutely emancipated from every burden.

— PATRICK EDWARD DOVE, Theory of Human Progression (1850), Chap. III., Sec. 3.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: December 29 -- Sumner

In a letter to the President of Congress, July 22, 1782, (Robert) Morris said that a large part of America was held by great landowners and that a land tax would have the salutary effect of an agrarian law without the iniquity.

— PROFESSOR WILLIAM C. SUMNER, The Financier and the Finances of the American Revolution, Vol. II., Chap. 33, p. 251. 

The Earth-for-All Calendar: December 28 -- Thorold Rogers

It is well known that vile and loathsome buildings, probably the property of some opulent landowner, yield from the misery of their inmates a far larger rent than the plots on which the most luxurious and convenient mansions are built. Dives is clothed in purple and fine linen and fares sumptuously every day from the crumbs which he sweeps out of the wallet of Lazarus.

— PROFESSOR THOROLD ROGERS, Work and Wages, Chap. XV., p. 426.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: December 27 -- Cardinal Manning

The land question . . . means hunger, thirst, nakedness, notice to quit, labor spent in vain, the toil of years seized upon, the breaking up of homes, the miseries, sicknesses, deaths of parents, children, wives; the despair and wildness which spring up in the hearts of the poor, when legal force, like a sharp harrow, goes over the most sensitive and vital right of mankind. All this is contained in the land question.

— CARDINAL MANNING, Letter to Earl Grey (1868), Miscellanies, Vol. I.; p. 251 

The Earth-for-All Calendar: December 26 -- Cardinal Vaughan

Millions of human creatures are housed worse than the cattle and horses of many a lord or squire. Nearly, a million of the London poor need re-housing; the medical authority has reported against 141,000 houses as insanitary, in which the poor are huddled together, in numbers varying from four to twelve and more in a single room. What delicacy, modesty or self-respect can be expected in men and women whose bodies are so shamefully packed together?

— CARDINAL VAUGHAN, Inaugural Address to the Annual Conference of the Catholic Truth Society at Stockport, published in the St. Vincent de Paul Quarterly, New York, November, 1892, p 286.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: December 25 -- St. Luke

And she brought forth her first-born son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.

— ST. LUKE, II., 7.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: December 24 -- Sue

"Yes, ah yes, there is frightful misery in the world," answered Gabriel tenderly and sadly.  "Yes, many of the poor, cut off from all joy, all hope, are cold and hungry and in want of shelter and raiment, in the midst of the immense riches which the Creator has provided, not for the happiness of a few, but for the happiness of all, for his wish was that they should be equitably divided — but a few have acquired the common inheritance by fraud and violence."

— EUGENE SUE, The Wandering Jew, Part XVI., Chap. 34.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: December 23 -- Wagner

Look hence, ye wretched ones, upon those blessed fields ye now flit through as thralls, as aliens. Free shall ye wander there, free from the yoke of the living, free from the chains of the dead. What Nature made, what men have tilled and turned into a fruitful garden, belongs to men, the needy, and none shall come and say, "To me alone belongs all this; ye are but guests I tolerate so long as I may please, and they shall yield me tribute, guests I drive forth when so inclined. To me belongs what Nature made, what Man has wrought, and the living needs."  Away with that lie; to Need alone belongs what satisfies it, and such is offered in abundance by Nature and your own strong arm.

— RICHARD WAGNER, The Revolution, Prose Works, Vol. VIII., Chap. 14, p. 235.  (Translation of W. A. Ellis.)

The Earth-for-All Calendar: December 22 -- Tolstoy

The earth cannot be anyone's property; it cannot be bought or sold any more than water, air or sunshine.  All have an equal right to the advantages it gives to men.

— COUNT LEO TOLSTOY, Resurrection, Book II., Chap. 6.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: December 21 -- St. Ambrose and Dr. McGlynn

God has ordered all things to be produced, so that there should be food in common to all, and that the earth should be a common possession to all. Nature therefore has produced a common right for all, but greed has made it a right for a few.

— ST. AMBROSE, On the Duties of the Clergy (A. D. 391), Chap. XXVIII., Sec. 132. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Vol. X., p. 23.

The Creator has made ample provision for all men in the storehouse of nature and in the faculties and powers of man. To do God's will, we must make room at the Father's table for all His children.

— FATHER EDWARD McGLYNN, Lecture on the Fatherhood of God and Brotherhood of Man.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: December 20 -- Blackstone

The ground was in common and no part of it was the permanent property of any man in particular; yet whoever was in occupation of any determined spot of it, for rest, for shade or the like, acquired for the time a sort of ownership, from which it would have been unjust and contrary to the law of nature to have driven him by force; but the instant that he quitted the use or occupation of it another might seize it without injustice.

— SIR WILLIAM BLACKSTONE, Commentaries, Book II., Chap. I, p. 3.

Henry George's chapter in McNeill's "The Labor Movement: The Problem of Today" (1887)

I stumbled across an excerpt from this in The American Cooperator, and when I couldn't find the material in any of George's other books, I went looking for the source, an 1887 book with chapters by 16 authors.  

Enjoy!  (It prints out as about 9 pages, if you're so inclined)

http://archive.org/stream/labormovementpro00mcneiala/labormovementpro00mcneiala_djvu.txt

THE LABOR MOVEMENT;
THE PROBLEM OF TODAY.

THE HISTORY, PURPOSE AND
POSSIBILITIES OF LABOR ORGANIZATIONS
IN EUROPE AND AMERICA; GUILDS, TRADES-
UNIONS, AND KNIGHTS OF LABOR; WAGES AND PROFITS;
HOURS OF LABOR; FUNCTIONS OF CAPITAL; CHINESE LABOR:
COMPETITION; ARBITRATION; PROFIT-SHARING AND
CO-OPERATION; PRINCIPLES OF THE KNIGHTS OF
LABOR; MORAL AND EDUCATIONAL AS-
PECTS OF THE LABOR QUESTION.

EDITED BY GEORGE E. McNEILL,
First Deputy of Mass. Bureau of Statistics of Labor; Sec.-Treas. of D. A. 30, Knights of Labor.

ASSOCIATE AUTHORS: TERENCE V. POWDERLY, G. M. W., K. of L.; DR. EDMUND J. JAMES, University of Pennsylvania; HON. JOHN J. O'NEILL, of Missouri; HON. J. M. FARQUHAR, of New York; HON. ROBERT HOWARD, of Massachusetts; HENRY GEORGE, of New York; ADOLPH STRASSER, Pres. Cigar Makers' Union; JOHN JARRETT, of Pennsylvania; REV. R. HEBER NEWTON, of New York; F K. FOSTER, of Massachusetts; P. M. ARTHUR, Chief Engineer Locomotive Brotherhood; W. W. STONE and W. W. MORROW, of California; FRANKLIN H. GIDDINGS, "Springfield Union"; JOHN McBRIDE, Secretary Coal Miners' Union; D.J.O'DONOGHUE, of Toronto, Canada; P. J. McGUIRE, Secretary Carpenters' Brotherhood, Ohio.

NEW YORK: THE M. W. HAZEN CO.
1887.

Copyright 1886, by
A M. BRIDGMAN & CO.

CHAPTER XXIII.  THE LAND QUESTION.

MAGNITUDE OF THE QUESTION — FIRST PRINCIPLES — THE LAND-OWNER THE ABSOLUTE MASTER OF MEN WHO MUST LIVE ON HIS LAND — THE ORDER OF NATURE INVERTED — EQUAL RIGHTS TO THE USE OF THE EARTH — SELFISHNESS, THE EVIL GENIUS OF MAN — THE IRISH PEOPLE FORCED TO BEG PERMISSION TO TILL THE SOIL — APPROPRIATION OF THE CHURCH-LANDS — LAND IN ITSELF HAS NO VALUE — THE GREAT CAUSE OF THE UNEQUAL DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH — NO HOPE FOR THE LABORER, SO LONG AS PRIVATE PROPERTY IN LAND EXISTS — NOTHING MYSTERIOUS ABOUT THE LABOR QUESTION — THE DIFFICULTY IN FINDING EMPLOYMENT — NATURE OFFERS FREELY TO LABOR — NATURAL MEANS OF EMPLOYMENT MONOPOLIZED — SPECULATION IN THE BOUNTIES OF NATURE.

BENEATH all the great social questions of our time lies one of primary and universal importance, the question of the rights of men to the use of the earth.

The magnitude of the pecuniary interests involved, the fact that the influential classes in all communities where private property in land exists are interested in its maintenance, lead to a disposition to ignore or belittle the land question: but it is impossible to give any satisfactory explanation of the most important social phenomena without reference to it; and the growing unrest of the masses of all civilized countries, under conditions which they feel to be galling and unjust, must at length lead them, as the only way of securing the rights of labor, to turn to the land question.

To see that the land question does involve the problem of the equitable distribution of wealth; that it lies at the root of all the vexed social questions of our time, and is, indeed, but another name for the great labor question in all its phases, it is only needful to revert to first principles, and to consider the relations between men and the planet they inhabit.

We find ourselves on the surface of a sphere, circling through immeasurable space. Beneath our feet, the diameter of the planet extends for eight thousand miles; above our heads night reveals countless points of light, which science tells us are suns, that blaze billions of miles away. In this inconceivably vast universe, we are confined to the surface of our sphere, as the mariner in mid-ocean is confined to the deck of his ship. We are limited to that line where the exterior of the planet meets the atmospheric envelope that surrounds it. We may look beyond, but cannot pass. We are not denizens of one element, like the fish; but while our bodies must be upheld by one element, they must be laved in another. We live on the earth, and in the air. In the search for minerals men are able to descend for a few thousand feet into the earth's crust, provided communication with the surface be kept open, and air thus supplied; and in balloons men have ascended to like distances above the surface; but on a globe of thirty-five feet diameter, this range would be represented by the thickness of a sheet of paper. And though it is thus possible for man to ascend for a few thousand feet above the surface, or to descend for a few thousand feet below it, it is only on the surface of the earth that he can habitually live and supply his wants; nor can he do this on all parts of the surface of the globe, but only on that smaller part, which we call land, as distinguished from the water, while considerable parts even of the land are uninhabitable by him.

By constructing vessels of materials obtained from land, and provisioning them with the produce of land, it is true that man is able to traverse the fluid-surface of the globe; yet he is none the less dependent upon land. If the land of the globe were again to be submerged, human life could not long be maintained on the best-appointed ships.

Man, in short, is a land-animal. Physically considered, he is as much a product of land as is the tree. His body, composed of materials drawn from land, can only be maintained by nutriment furnished by land; and all the processes by which he secures food, clothing and shelter consist but in the working up of land or the products of land. Labor is possible only on condition of access to land, and all human production is but the union of land and labor, the transportation or transformation of previously existing matter into places or forms suited to the satisfaction of man's needs.

Land, being thus indispensable to man, the most important of social adjustments is that which fixes the relations between men with regard to that element. Where all are accorded equal rights to the use of the earth, no one needs ask another to give him employment, and no one can stand in fear of being deprived of the opportunity to make, a living. In such a community, there could be no "labor question." There could be neither degrading poverty nor demoralizing wealth. And the personal independence arising from such a condition of equality, in respect to the ability to get a living, must give character to all social and political institutions.

On the other hand, inequality of privilege in the use of the earth must beget inequality of wealth and power, must divide men into those who can command and those who are forced to serve. The rewards which nature yields to labor no longer go to the laborers in proportion to industry and skill; but a privileged class are enabled to live without labor by compelling a disinherited class to give up some part of their earnings for permission to live and work. Thus the order of nature is inverted, those who do no work become rich, and "workingman" becomes synonymous, with "poor man." Material progress tends to monstrous wealth on one side, and abject poverty on the other; and society is differentiated into masters and servants, rulers and ruled.

If one man were permitted to claim the land of the world as his individual property, he would be the absolute master of all humanity. All the rest of mankind could live only by his permission, and under such conditions as he chose to prescribe. So, if one man be permitted to treat as his own the land of any country, he becomes the absolute sovereign of its people. Or, if the land of a country be made the property of a class, a ruling aristocracy is created, who soon begin to regard themselves, and to be regarded, as of nobler blood and superior rights. That "God will think twice before he damns people of quality," is the natural feeling of those who are taught to believe that the land on which all must live is legitimately their private property.

another post, of mouths and pairs of hands

Researching the post immediately below this one, I came across an interesting item which ends with these paragraphs.  I've highlighted the piece that caught my eye:

WHY DO WE LOOK AT EACH NEW birth as the arrival on earth of another hungry mouth? Why are we incapable of seeing that along with each new mouth comes a pair of hands? The world does not have six billion mouths to feed — it has six billion hard-working human beings whose creativity and ingenuity must be unleashed.

In the next decade India and China will each add to the planet about 10 times as many people as the US. But the stress on the “world’s carrying capacity” caused by the new Americans will far exceed India’s and China’s combined.

In any case even if, as predicted by the UN, Asians and Africans will make up 80 per cent of humanity by 2050, they will simply have returned to being proportionately as numerous as they were before the Industrial Revolution.

 

Who Benefits by Single Tax?

It seems a hard thing for many to understand how the single tax, as applied at Fairhope or elsewhere, can benefit both those who have little and those who have much. They think that if the tax burden upon the wealthy man's fine improvement is decreased, it must be at the expense of his poorer neighbor; or on the other hand, if the poor man's burden is lightened, it must be because it is shifted to the well-to-do. The fact is that the wealthy man whose wealth is genuine wealth, houses, stores, stocks (of goods) and other things which are the product of labor — not the possessor of monopoly privileges — will be benefited by the freeing from taxation of these forms of wealth, and the poor man will be benefited by the exemption of his smaller improvement if he be a home-owner, and if he be not, by the destruction of land speculation, making it easy for him to secure land for a home or for cultivation, and by an increased demand for his labor from others and the increased ability of others to buy his products if he be a producer.

"But somebody must be hurt by your policy. You can't benefit everybody, the beneficiaries of the present system as well as its victims," will say the skeptic. To which we say: There is plenty of room for the argument as to whether the enthronement of Justice ever did or can hurt anybody; but so far as the colony is concerned, there are no beneficiaries of injustice. No one has ever been given the privilege of collecting tribute in the form of unearned land values, and the wealthy and the poor are alike benefited by the taking for public use of that which belongs and has been held from the beginning to belong to the public, but elsewhere is made the privilege of a favored few.

Outside the colony the application of the single tax to present conditions would take somebody's privileges and profits, and it will be those who are "reaping where they have not sown" in the collection of land values rightly belonging to the public for the two highest reasons: first, because their collection for the common benefit is necessary to insure to each his inherent right to live upon the earth; and second, because such values are the result of their joint presence and activity, and not traceable to individual exertions.

-- Fairhope Courier, quoted in The American Cooperator (1903)

Herbert Bigelow: Saving Souls from Hell

The final sentence: "The law of gravitation is not more clearly demonstrable than the law of taxation which Henry George, the Newton of Political Science, has revealed to the world."

Another from The American Cooperator (1903):

A Work for the Church

Rev. Herbert S. Bigelow

Ask the average church-member what is the mission of the church? He has a readymade phrase for you. He says it is to "save souls." In the theological seminaries young men are taught that to he good preachers, they must have a "passion for souls." A certain missionary society of a church in this city reported at the end of the year, "Two souls saved and one sanctified."

Is it the paramount duty of the church to save souls? That depends on what is meant by the phrase. Save them from what? From hell, of course. Is it the mission of the church to save souls from hell? That depends upon the location of hell. Do you mean by hell some place of torment in the next world or do you mean the torment of body, mind and soul that is produced in this world, by greed of gain, and slavish prejudice, and bigotry and hate, by oppressive monopolies, and corrupting power, and bitter poverty?

I take no stock in your God-made hell, but I know there is a hell on earth which man has made. Here on this earth I have witnessed the torture of the damned. Let us storm one hell at a time and the nearest one first.

But there are many church members who do not know what we mean by a hell on earth. They are able to go to the sea-shore in the heat of summer. They can go to Florida or California and eat strawberries in winter.

They seldom come in contact with poverty. From the very air they breathe, they have imbibed the prejudice that poverty is mostly a result of depravity; that for the "deserving poor," there is no help but charity; that the masses who toil are by nature unfit for a happier lot; that the man who imposes an extra tax of two cents a gallon on oil and contributes a million to a university is a paragon of virtue, and the institutions which make it possible for him to do this are ordained of God.

One of these more comfortable churchmembers visited recently in Cincinnati. She heard men in the street crying "Coal, coal!" She asked what it was they were selling. When told, she expressed amazement that the people of Cincinnati did not buy their coal in the ton. She declared she had never heard of such a thing. Indeed she was certain that in Cleveland where she lived, there was no coal sold by the bushel. This woman is typical of her class. Within a narrow sphere, she is generous to a fault. There is no question about the genuineness of her piety. She will shed sincere tears over the tragic sufferings of the Nazarene, and contribute for the preaching of the gospel in foreign parts, but of the appalling misery in her own city and of its cause, she is as grossly ignorant as the Australian Bushman is of the doctrine of salvation by grace.

The duty of the church to save souls? Yes, it is the duty of the church to save the souls of men and women from that ignorance and indifference which makes them oblivions of the sufferings of their fellowmen.

In every great city you will find a little group of earnest men and women who are trying to bring to the notice of the public, the desperate conditions under which their brothers and sisters live and to show the economic cause of this destitution and its remedy. And while such bands are few and weak, you will find scattered here and there and everywhere thru the city, churches, often costly edifices, religious organizations, representing a vast expenditure of wealth and energy. All the reformers in the city could not contribute for their work what is paid in a year to one of these clergymen. Fancy how things would begin to move if this tremendous energy were directed toward the solution of the problem of poverty! If all this thought and sentiment and power of wealth were only hitched to this car of progress, how the wheels would start out of the mud!

Jonathan Edwards used to say to his audience: ''The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath towards you burns like fire. . . .  It would be a wonder if some who are now present should not be in hell in a very short time  . . .  There is reason to think that there are many in this congregation, now hearing this discourse, that will actually be the subjects of this very misery to all eternity."

As long as men believed in that sort of a God, they naturally expected the church to help them flee from the wrath to come. But from the various sources of modern thought has come a better thought of God. He is still the Creator but he is not the bungler. He made a good world. This world is "lapt in universal law." In his benevolence, the Creator contrived these laws so that in the keeping of them, men should find great reward. Hell on earth-is due to the breaking of these laws. To learn to obey them, is to find heaven here.

To teach men these laws is the mission of the church. There is no law of the Decalogue which is more self-evident than the law that the land is the inheritance of all and its monopoly by the few a crime against the many. The law of gravitation is not more clearly demonstrable than the law of taxation which Henry George, the Newton of Political Science, has revealed to the world.

 

Tom Johnson, on the Earth, and privilege

"God gave the earth to all the people, and not to some of them. The privileges should be for all of them, and not bartered off to some of them. That, gentlemen, constitutes my political economy, my politics, and (I say it reverently) my religion. And it is, I believe, the religion that Christ taught the people many years ago."

-- Tom Johnson, mayor of Cleveland and U. S. congressman

quoted in The American Cooperator (1903)

The Earth-for-All Calendar: December 19 -- Pufendorf

As to that which is produced by Nature, without any aid from human industry, I mean the land, since its vast extent provided enough for all, in the early times when the human race was small, in numbers, men appropriated at first as much as they thought they had need of; the rest was left in common.

— PUFENDORF, Law of Nature and Nations (1672) Book IV., Chap. 4, Sec. 6.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: December 18 -- Voltaire

Society is in general the owner of the territory of a country, the source of national wealth.

— VOLTAIRE, Dictionnaire Philosophique, tit. Droit Canonique, Sec. 2. Oeuvres, Vol. LIV., p. 138.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: December 17 -- Carlyle

No generation of men can or could, with never such solemnity and effort, sell land on any other principle; it is not the property of any generation, we say, but that of all the past generations that have worked on it, and of all the future ones that shall work on it.

— THOMAS CARLYLE, Past and Present, Book III., Chap. 8.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: December 16 -- Grant Allen

"Of course the fact that a chief or land-owner has bought and paid for a particular privilege or species of taboo, or has inherited from his fathers, doesn't give him in any moral claim to it. The question is, Is the claim in itself right and reasonable? for a wrong is only all the more a wrong for having been long and persistently exercised."

— GRANT ALLEN, The British Barbarians. (Words spoken by Bertram.)

The Earth-for-All Calendar: December 15 -- Red Jacket

We conclude that we do not understand this as the white people do. As soon as the white people come there, they will think the land theirs; for that is the way of white people.

— RED JACKET, Stone's Life of Red Jacket (1866), Chap. V., p. 227.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: December 14 -- Pope

Yet there are wights that fondly call their own
Half that the devil o'erlooks from Lincoln town.

— ALEXANDER POPE, Imitations of Horace, II., 2, verses 244-245.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: December 13 -- Horace

This farm that now goes by Umbrenus' name,
And by mine went till recently, no one may claim
As exclusively his.

— HORACE, Satires II, 2. (Translation of Sir Theodore Martin.)

The Earth-for-All Calendar: December 12 -- Emerson

I feel called upon in behalf of rational nature, which I represent, to declare to you my opinion, that if the earth is yours, so also is it mine.

— R. W. EMERSON, The Conservative.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: December 11 -- Tolstoy

Being himself heir to a large property, he was especially struck by the position taken up by Spencer in "Social Statics" that justice forbids private land-holding, and with the straightforward resoluteness of his age, had not merely spoken to prove that land could not be looked upon as private property and written essays on that subject at the university, but had acted up to his convictions, and, considering it wrong to hold landed property, had given the small piece of land he had inherited from his father to the peasants.

— COUNT LEO TOLSTOY, Resurrection, Book I., Chap. 3.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: December 10 -- Spencer

After all, nobody does implicitly believe in landlordism.

— HERBERT SPENCER, in 1850, Social Statics, Chap. IX.

Not only have land tenures an indefensible origin, but it is impossible to discover any mode by which land can become private property.

— HERBERT SPENCER, in 1850, Social Statics, Chap. IX.

The right of mankind at large to the earth's surface is still valid, all deeds, customs and laws notwithstanding.

— HERBERT SPENCER, in 1850, Social Statics, Chap. IX.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: December 9 -- Murray and Arnold

To turn a landed proprietor out of the seat you have once allowed him to occupy is about as pleasant a job as trying to root up a live oak with a pocket-knife.

— E. C. GRENTVILLE MURRAY, The Member for Paris, p. 157.

Landowners hate parting with their land.

— MATTHEW ARNOLD, The Incompatibles, Irish Essays, p. 29.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: December 8 -- Bird and Cooper

'Tis ever from the darkest cloud,
     Brooding in mourning deep,
The crackling thunder volleys loud,
    And jagged lightnings leap;
And from the gloom o'er wood and lake
    A warning murmur thrills
Woe to the hand that tries td take
    The freedom of the hills

 — ROBERT BIRD, The Freedom of the Hills, Songs of Freedom, p. 295.

There's them living who say that Nathaniel Bumppo's right to shoot on these hills is of older date than Marmaduke Temple's right to forbid him," he said.

— J. FENIMORE COOPER, The Pioneers (1822), Chap. I., p. 12.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: December 7 -- Schiller

At last, when all the earth had been divided,
The Poet, from the far-away drew near.
"Alas! They have forgotten me," he chided,
For they had left him nothing here.

— SCHILLER, The Division of the Earth.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: December 6 -- Sand

Each bit of land is a fortress, and the law makes a crime of every step which a man dares to take on the jealous and forbidding property of another man. "There is nature as we have made it," thought Pierre Huguenin, as he traversed these deserts created by humanity; "can God recognize His handiwork in it? Is this the beautiful earthly paradise He once confided to us to embellish and extend from horizon to horizon over the whole face of the globe?"

— GEORGE SAND, Le Compagnon du Tour de France, Vol. II., Chap. 22, p. 18.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: December 5 -- Sismondi

The economists have concluded from this that the landowners were the only masters of the situation, and that they could turn the nation out when they pleased.

— SISMONDI, New Principles of Political Economy (1820), Book III., Chap. 5.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: December 4 -- Mathilde Blind

And so that he unstinted may abide
In all the pomp and power of lordly pride,
Riot in lawless loves, or, if he please,
Have a refreshing change of palaces;
Or softly warmed in scented orange bowers,
Shun his moist land of mist and mountain showers,
The far-off master hath declared his will,
To have the crofters swept from every dale and hill.

— MATHILDE BLIND, Heather on Fire.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: December 3 -- John Bright

We have the landowner first, who is always becoming richer.  . . . But if you come to the laborers, who cultivate the land, by whose toils and whose sweat your tables are furnished with bread and with beef and with many other things that they produce, you find these laborers at this moment, I believe, at a comparatively greater distance from the landlord . . .  than they were at any former period.

— JOHN BRIGHT, Speech at Birmingham, January 26, 1864.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: December 2 -- Cobden

The landlords have been revelling in prosperity — in a bloated and diseased prosperity — at the very time when the people have been suffering the greatest privation and want of food.

— RICHARD COBDEN, Speech at London, September 28, 1843; Speeches of Richard Cobden, p. 35. (Edited by John Bright and Thorold Rogers.)

The Earth-for-All Calendar: December 1 -- Thorold Rogers

The most impudent hypocrite of all is the great proprietor who, being a principal cause of the misery which he affects to deprecate, would be disgusted and furious if he were to be shown in his true colors, and so trusts in ignorance and sophistry when he laments the condition of the poor, but secretly and steadily adds to their burdens.

— PROFESSOR THOROLD ROGERS, Work and Wages, Chap. XVI., p. 457.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: November 30 -- Rudyard Kipling

Me voici, owner of some four hundred well developed pines, a few thousand tons of granite scattered in blocks at the roots of the pines, and a sprinkling of earth. That's a town lot in Vancouver. You or your agent hold to it till property rises, then sell out and buy more land further out of town and repeat the process. I do not quite see how this sort of thing helps the growth of a town, but the English Boy says that it is the "essence of speculation," so it must be all right.

— RUDYARD KIPLING, From Sea to Sea, Chap. XXVIII

 

The Earth-for-All Calendar: November 29 -- Goethe

The overplus of wealth in torpor bound,
Which in thy lands lies buried in the ground,
Is all unused; nor boldest thoughts can measure
The narrowest boundaries of such a treasure.

— GOETHE, Faust, Part II., Act r, Scene 4. (Translation of Bayard Taylor.)

The Earth-for-All Calendar: November 28 -- Morris and Ruskin

He may, and often he does, engross the first necessity of labor, land, and neither use it himself or allow anyone else to use it, and though it is clear that . . . he is injuring the community, the law is sternly on his side.

— WILLIAM MORRIS, Signs of Change, p. 194.

Land should be given to those who can use it.

— JOHN RUSKIN, Fors Clavigera, Part II., Letter ii, p. 96.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: November 27 -- Turgot

Not only can there be no income which is not the product of land, but it is also land that furnishes all the capital which constitutes the mass of all the sums advanced in agriculture or commerce.

— TURGOT, On the Formation and Distribution of Wealth (1766), Sec. 99.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: November 26 -- Balzac!

"You are living off my land," said the general with jesting severity.

"Do you think I can live off the sky?" returned Gaubertin with a sneer.

— BALZAC, Sons of the Soil (1845), Chap. VI., p. 722.

The Earth-for-All Calendar -- addendum: St. Ambrose and Pope Paul VI

A sig-file on a listserv brought to my attention a quote from St. Ambrose, which, to my surprise, Ernest Crosby didn't include in his Earth-for-All Calendar:

"You are not making a gift of what is yours to the poor man, but you are giving him back what is his. You have been appropriating things that are meant to be for the common use of everyone. The earth belongs to everyone, not to the rich."

 

A bit of research led me to a number of mentions of this passage, including Pope Paul VI's 1967 encyclical, Populorum Progressio, which sets it in this context:

Issues and Principles

22. In the very first pages of Scripture we read these words: "Fill the earth and subdue it."(19) This teaches us that the whole of creation is for man, that he has been charged to give it meaning by his intelligent activity, to complete and perfect it by his own efforts and to his own advantage.

Now if the earth truly was created to provide man with the necessities of life and the tools for his own progress, it follows that every man has the right to glean what he needs from the earth. The recent Council reiterated this truth: "God intended the earth and everything in it for the use of all human beings and peoples. Thus, under the leadership of justice and in the company of charity, created goods should flow fairly to all." (20)

All other rights, whatever they may be, including the rights of property and free trade, are to be subordinated to this principle. They should in no way hinder it; in fact, they should actively facilitate its implementation. Redirecting these rights back to their original purpose must be regarded as an important and urgent social duty.

The Use of Private Property

23. "He who has the goods of this world and sees his brother in need and closes his heart to him, how does the love of God abide in him?" (21) Everyone knows that the Fathers of the Church laid down the duty of the rich toward the poor in no uncertain terms. As St. Ambrose put it: "You are not making a gift of what is yours to the poor man, but you are giving him back what is his. You have been appropriating things that are meant to be for the common use of everyone. The earth belongs to everyone, not to the rich." (22) These words indicate that the right to private property is not absolute and unconditional.

No one may appropriate surplus goods solely for his own private use when others lack the bare necessities of life. In short, "as the Fathers of the Church and other eminent theologians tell us, the right of private property may never be exercised to the detriment of the common good." When "private gain and basic community needs conflict with one another," it is for the public authorities "to seek a solution to these questions, with the active involvement of individual citizens and social groups." (23)

The Common Good

24. If certain landed estates impede the general prosperity because they are extensive, unused or poorly used, or because they bring hardship to peoples or are detrimental to the interests of the country, the common good sometimes demands their expropriation.

Vatican II affirms this emphatically. (24) At the same time it clearly teaches that income thus derived is not for man's capricious use, and that the exclusive pursuit of personal gain is prohibited. Consequently, it is not permissible for citizens who have garnered sizeable income from the resources and activities of their own nation to deposit a large portion of their income in foreign countries for the sake of their own private gain alone, taking no account of their country's interests; in doing this, they clearly wrong their country. (25)

 

(19) Gn 1. 28.

(20) Church in the World of Today, no. 69: AAS 58 (1966), 1090 [cf. TPS XI, 306].

(21) 1 Jn 3. 17.

(22) De Nabute, c. 12, n. 53: PL 14. 747; cf. J. R. Palanque, Saint Ambroise et l'empire romain,Paris: de Boccard (1933), 336 ff.

(23) Letter to the 52nd Social Week at Brest, in L'homme et la révolution urbaine, Lyon: Chronique sociale (1965), 8-9.

(24) Church in the World of Today, no. 71: AAS 58 (1966), 1093 [cf. TPS XI, 308].

(25) Ibid., no. 65: AAS 58 (1966), 1086 [cf. TPS XI, 303].

 

Those interested in Catholic Social Thought should look for a new book which came out of a 2007 conference held at the University of Scranton, and edited by Professor Kenneth R. Lord of UScranton, entitled "Two Views of Social Justice: A Catholic/Georgist Dialogue."  The version I've seen is the October, 2012, issue of The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, and I understand that it will be made available in other forms as well.

The abstract for the book:

Sixteen scholars have come together in this issue to examine eight social-justice themses from the perspectives of Catholic Social Thought and the philosophy of Henry George.  The themes they address are natural law, human nature, the nature of work, the nineteenth-century papal encyclical Rerum Novarum, causes of war, immigration, development, and wealth, and neighborhood revitalization.  While they sometimes wrangle with each other, their common aspiration is the same as their nineteenth-century predecessors,: to find solutions to the human suffering caused by injustice. 

The Earth-for-All Calendar: November 25 -- Alfred Marshall

The use of a certain area of the earth's surface is a primary condition of anything that man can do; it gives him room for his own actions, with the enjoyment of the heat and the light, the air and the rain which nature assigns to the area; and it determines his distance from, and in a great measure his relations to, other things and other persons.  We shall find that it is this property of "land" which, though as yet insufficient prominence has been given to it, is the ultimate cause of the distinction which all writers on economics are compelled to make between land and other things.

— PROF. ALFRED MARSHALL, of the University of Cambridge,

Principles of Economics, Vol. I., Book 4, Chap. 2, Sec. I.

 

The Earth-for-All Calendar: November 24 -- Martineau

I suppose the result must be . . . the establishment of society under a wholly new idea. . . The leading features of any such radical change must be a deep modification of the institution of property — certainly in regard to land, and probably in regard to much else.

— HARRIET MARTINEAU (1853), Autobiography, Vol. II., Sec. 10, p. 119.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: November 23 -- Carlyle and Conway

Soil, with or without plowing, is the gift of God.

— THOMAS CARLYLE, Past and Present, Book III., Chap. 8.

It was a part of his (Carlyle's) view, for instance, that private property in land should be abolished.

— MONCURE D. CONWAY, Thomas Carlyle, p. 92.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: November 22 -- Matthew, Psalms & Jeremiah

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

— St. Matthew, v. 5.

The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof, the world and they that dwell therein. 

— Psalms, XXIV., i.

Thus saith the Lord, . . . I will return and have compassion on them, and will bring them again, every man to his heritage and every man to his land.

— Jeremiah, XII., 14-15.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: November 21 -- William Morris

"And how shall it be when these are gone? What else shall ye need when ye lack masters?  Ye shall not lack for the fields ye have tilled nor the houses ye have built nor the cloth ye have woven."

— WILLIAM MORRIS, A Dream of John Ball, Chap. IV., p. 40.  (Speech of John Ball.)

The Earth-for-All Calendar: November 20 -- Isaiah

They shall build houses and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards and eat the fruit of them. They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat.

— Isaiah, LXV., 21-2.