TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE ENCYCLICAL ON LABOUR.
THE kind of rapture with which English Catholics have received the Encyclical on Labour, is justified by its contents, which are worthy at once of the intellectual reputation of the present Pontiff, and of the great Church of which he claims to be the voice. In our time, no paper at once so dignified, so strong, and so penetrated with Christian feeling intelligible to all the Churches alike, has issued from the Vatican, or one which will give so great a shock to those who fancy that the Papacy intends to catch the multitude by going back on all its ancient principles. A Pope must always speak as a Doctor of Christianity, and it is impossible to deliver a great body of Christian opinion without repeating some ancient thoughts in well-worn forms ; but Leo XIII. has avoided every other of the usual defects in Papal utterances. He abstains from all medifeval forms of denunciation. He is definite to a marvel, clear to audacity, terse till, in the English version at least, he almost steps over the bounds of Pontifical etiquette, and uses epigram as a judicial weapon. What those mean who accuse the Encyclical of reserves, we cannot even conceive, unless, indeed, moderation be reserve, and thorough comprehension of the adversary dissimulation. The Pope, with the full authority of his office, declares that individualism is founded on the law of Nature, and in accord with the revealed will, and that Socialism is either an illusion or a falsehood. Its main precept is not even in accord with the interest of the majority :—" It is surely undeniable that, when a man engages in remunerative labour, the very reason and motive of his work is to obtain property, and to hold it as his own private possession. If one man hires out to another his strength or his industry, he does this for the purpose of receiving in return what is necessary for food and living ; he thereby expressly proposes to acquire a full and real right, not only to the remuneration, but also to the disposal of that remuneration as he pleases. Thus, if he lives sparingly, saves money, and invests his savings, for greater security, in land, the land in such a case is only his wages in another form ; and, consequently, a working man's little estate thus purchased should be as completely at his own disposal as the wages he receives for his labour. But it is precisely in this power of disposal that ownership consists, whether the property be land or movable goods. The Socialists, therefore, in endeavouring to transfer the possessions of individuals to the community, strike at the interests of every wage-earner, for they deprive him of the liberty of disposing of his wages, and thus of all hope and possibility of increasing his stock and of bettering his con- dition in life." The Pope's general line of argument is, that private property is sacred, for it is not only, in one form or another, the product of labour, but it has been, as a rule especially applicable to land, so changed by its owner's exertion that he has made it his own, "left on it the impress of his own personality," and is therefore entitled to possess that which he has, in fact, created. More- over, the right to ownership by inheritance is also sacred, for the family is anterior even to the State, and the family depends upon the right of accumulation :—" For it is a most sacred law of Nature that a father must provide food and all necessaries for those whom he has begotten ; and, similarly, Nature dictates that a man's children, who carry on, as it were, and continue his own personality, should be provided by him with all that is needful to enable them honourably to keep themselves from want and misery in the uncertainties of this mortal life. Now, in no other way can a father effect this except by the ownership of profitable property, which he can transmit to his children by in- heritance. A family, no less than a State, is, as we have said, a true society, governed by a power within itself, that is to say, by the father. Wherefore, provided the limits be not transgressed which are prescribed by the very purposes for which it exists, the Family has at least equal rights with the State in the choice and pursuit of those things which are needful to its preservation and its just liberty." It is, therefore, the essential, nay, even the first duty of the State, to protect private property, both against external violence and that over-taxation which makes the enjoyment of property only nominal. . The former pro- position is laid down with a frankness which Collectivists of all kinds will pronounce simply brutal, and which certainly no political economist could possibly exceed :— "Here, however, it will be advisable to advert expressly to one or two of the more important details. It must be borne in mind that the chief thing to be secured [by the State] is the safeguarding, by legal enactment and policy-, of private property. Most of all is it essential in these times of covetous greed, to keep the multitude within the line of duty ; for if all may justly strive to better their condition, yet neither justice nor the common good allows any one to seize that which belongs to another, or, under the pretext of futile and ridiculous equality, to lay hands on other people's fortunes. It is most true that by far the larger part of the people who work prefer to improve themselves by honest labour rather than by doing wrong to others. But there are not a few who are imbued with bad principles and are anxious for revolutionary change, and whose great purpose it is to stir up tumult and bring about a policy of violence. The authority of the State should intervene to put restraint upon these disturbers, to save the workmen from their seditious arts, and to pro- tect lawful owners from spoliation." There is no in- definiteness, at all events, about that paragraph, which will, we fancy, come as a surprise to those who have fancied, in the teeth of its history, that the Papacy might become Socialist, who have forgotten that Socialism and charity cannot co-exist, and who in their hearts reject a. proposition perpetually demonstrated in the history of mankind, which the Pope thus re-states :— " Let it be laid down, in the first place, that humanity Must remain as it is. It is impossible to reduce human society to a. level. The Socialists may do their utmost, but all striving against Nature is vain. There naturally exist among mankind innumer- able differences of the most important kind ; people differ in capability, in diligence, in health, and in strength; and unequal fortune is a necessary result of inequality in condition. Such in- equality is far from being disadvantageous either to individuals or to the community ; social and public life can only go on by the help of various kinds of capacity and the playing of many parts ; and each man, as a rule, chooses the part which peculiarly suits his case. As regards bodily labour, even had man never fallen from the state of innocence, he would not have been wholly unoccupied ; but that which would then have been his free choice and his delight, became afterwards compulsory, and the painful expiation of his sin. Cursed be the earth in thy work; in thy labour thou shalt eat of it all the days of thy life. In like manner, the other pains and hardships of life will have no end or cessation on this earth ; for the consequences of sin are bitter and hard to bear, and they must be with man as long as life lasts. To suffer and to endure, therefore, is the lot of humanity ; let men try as they may, no strength and no artifice will ever succeed in banish- ing from human life the ills and troubles which beset it. If any there are who pretend differently—who hold out to a hard-pressed people freedom from pain and trouble, undisturbed repose, and constant enjoyment—they cheat the people and impose upon them, and their lying promises will only make the evil worse than before. There is nothing more useful than to look at the world as it really is—and at the same time to look elsewhere for a remedy to. its troubles."
All that the good can do is to alleviate suffering by justice and generosity, and in justice the Pope includes mercy in all its forms, the payment of wages sufficient for comfort- able though "frugal" living, and the arrangement of such hours of labour as will allow of the rest necessary to make man religious as well as healthy. Both these things may be ensured in extreme cases, or in all cases where there is evident oppression, by the State, which in particular may intervene on behalf of children. But the Pope trusts for the cure of curable evils, first, to the influence of religion ; secondly, to the intervention of the Church, which he would fain make the universal intermediary ; and thirdly, to the principle of Association, which the Pope distinctly com- mends, and trusts so far, if only it is regulated by Christian principle, that he would make a committee appointed by a Union (p. 36) arbiter in disputes between employer and employed,—almost the only counsel of perfection in the Encyclical. The Pope is throughout, indeed, full of con- sideration for the poor, while denying in resolute, clear- cutting language, that either their pity for themselves, or ours for them, can justify the suspension or disregard of any moral law.
We have quoted enough, we think, to make the attitude of the Papacy on the Labour question clear, and we shall be deeply interested to watch the effect of so authoritative an utterance upon the Catholic world. It can hardly, we think, in the long-run be other than beneficial. At first, no doubt, it will tend to rivet that strange alliance between labour and the new paganism which is on the Continent the most puzzling, as it is one of the most marked, among the problems of the day. Outside England, the great corporation of Labour has become momentarily infidel, and as hostile to Churches as to Capital, and its leaders will undoubtedly grow more virulent, because, as they will say, the Papacy has declared for the bourgeoisie, and even gone beyond the economists in its defence of private property. There is nothing, they will declare, to be hoped from the Church, and therefore the Church must be destroyed. That tone, however, is but a passing phenomenon. Ever since Christianity was first preached, the instinct of the poor has taught them the truth which Robespierre formulated in the sentence," Atheism is aristocratic," that but for religion, strength would rule unchecked ; that without Christianity there is for philanthropy no ultimate sanction ; that the last five Commandments form, as we once expressed it, the Charter of the Poor. The religious will win, if only because they are also the self-suppressing ; and with all who are at once religious in any degree and Roman Catholic, this Encyclical will have weight as the most authoritative statement, as regards property and labour, of the Christian creed. Opinion in the whole body of the priesthood, among all women, in the immense majority of the peasants, and in that large section of the Continental bourgeoisie which still more than half-believes, will become solidified, and will hold that the defence of private property, which, after all, is the question underlying the whole Socialist dispute, is not either " larceny " or selfishness, but positively right in morals. The doubt which has harassed the respectables will so far as the Encyclical is trusted, disappear, and we shall see a new energy displayed in the defence of the old hierarchical arrangement of society as one compatible with the existence of a rightly ordered world. The teaching of the economists has for every Catholic—and, remember, there are millions for whom Catholicism is the only divine law, though they so constantly disobey it—been sanctioned from the religious side. And, on the other hand, thpugh Pope Leo's warm denunciations of oppression for greed may not make capitalists more philanthropic, his distinct declaration that labour has a right to a comfortable though " frugal " life—what courage it must have required in an epoch of universal suffrage to put in that word 1—will give new heart to the millions, while his praise of Associations will take from them a stigma which in Catholic countries has made so many look askance even on plans of co-operation. The operation of utterances like those of the Encyclical is very slow, even in those communities which in theory regard them as half-divine ; but they filter very far down, and they dissolve almost immediately a dangerous kind of opposition. Those who think the opinion of the Papacy, when expressed as this has been—that is, almost as formally and. carefully as if addressed "to the city and the world "—matters nothing, should bethink themselves what they would have said. and apprehended if the Papacy, as so many foolishly expected, had given as distinct a decision in favour of the Socialistic view.
Previous page
