ECONOMIC REST
Winding up days with toil and nights with sleep.
SHAKESPEARE.
There are deep-lying causes of anxiety, unrest, and sleeplessness
that more or less affect us all: yet, eighteen hundred years ago, One
cried, “The Kingdom of God is at hand.” Not, to come eventually, or
to future peoples, but “the Kingdom is at hand.” We have looked over
a world filled with injustice, for the coming of the kingdom—but we
have not seen it. What is it that hides “the Kingdom at hand” from our
eyes? Is it not iniquity? What kind of iniquity? We once had chattel
slavery, which was denounced as “the sum of all villainies.” We still
have monopoly of the gift of God, which is the fundamental iniquity.
For every one of his children a loving father made ample provision
in the earth, but we have allowed a few to monopolize it all; some
nine out of every hundred own our earth, and we find that, under such
circumstances, the laws of God are impracticable; therefore, we say
“the Kingdom is not a real Kingdom—it is only in men’s minds, only in
some far-off imaginable day it may be in their hearts.”
The kingdom of God is in our hearts, and, if to-day we will but allow
all our fellows to share in the bounty of Nature, the kingdom will be
around us also, here and now.
For there is a divine order, a natural law, obedience to which brings
its own immediate rewards; disobedience to which involves its own
punishment. The first order of Nature is that men should derive their
subsistence from the land and the products of land, provided by an
all-wise Creator. From what else can we derive it? Does not everything
we need, from the wheat to the wheel of the watch, come from the earth?
By many hands, by many processes, through many stages, all forms of
wealth are obtained by labor from the land. Food, clothing, fuel,
machinery, buildings, capital are all results of men working on the
materials of the earth. So it is clear why, when we have allowed men to
be shut out from that earth, we find ourselves surrounded by poverty
and misery.
Like all fundamental laws, the law of our economic relations is simple
and easily understood, even by children. It may be stated thus: food,
clothes, and shelter, being essential to the maintenance of human life,
all human creatures have equal need of and, therefore, equal right to
access to the source of food, clothes, and shelter. This source is the
earth, and the only method known whereby the earth may be made to yield
food, clothes, and shelter is by the application of labor to land.
For, no matter what picture we conjure up, whether it be of the farmer
tilling the soil, the carpenter building a house, the factory operative
weaving cloth, the engineer driving the locomotive that draws the
produce to markets—there we find labor. And, if we try to imagine any
of these forms of labor as cut off from land, we shall find our very
concept of labor and of life wiped out.
Everything necessary to life, whether it be the life of the individual,
the nation, or of the whole race, can be produced by the combination
of land and labor. Anything that restricts or hampers the application
of labor to land leads to suffering on the part of those deprived of
this access. When the government of a new country wants to increase
population, it offers free land to settlers. It does not say, “If you
will come to this country, the government will build mills, factories,
stores, offices, banks, and churches for you”; it says rather, “Here is
land, come and use it; build for yourselves out of its materials.” All
other forms of prosperity flow from the application of labor to land,
and, therefore, it is sufficient to give to men free access to natural
opportunities. If the government of a country owned all the land
of that country, it could increase, restrict, or otherwise regulate
population, and better or worsen the condition of that population by
the way in which it granted or withheld the land under its control.
This is in effect what government has done. It first bettered
conditions by allowing free access to land, and then worsened them
by allowing a few to make the land their private property; this
appropriation of the land carries with it the power to hold it out of
use, thus depriving all men of their equal right to the use of the
earth, the source of supply for all men’s wants. Instead of these
favored few being made to pay those deprived of the land an equivalent
for the privilege enjoyed, the disinherited many are compelled to pay a
premium to the landholder for the opportunity to labor.
When there is a lockout, is it not the pressure of want that brings
the men back, hat in hand, to the factory door? If one could go to the
outskirts of this town to cultivate a bit of the unused land, could he
not hold out till he got all that his labor was worth? And, when he and
his fellows are offered less, if they could but get at the unused mines
and quarries and coalfields and factory sites, and vacant lots, they
would not need to seek an employer at all—they could get credit, if
needed, and produce for themselves the capital which they now produce
for others and employ themselves in doing it.
So many evils flow from the fundamental wrong of shutting up the earth,
that rest, the peace of mind and body that makes for refreshing sleep,
is to many impossible.
And who that understands would wish it otherwise? Were the power of
rest and peace universal now, it would be a denial of the very cause
of rest,—the proper understanding of man’s relations to humanity and
to life. Until man has adjusted his economic contrivances to the
underlying laws of a true Social Science, he cannot have national or
racial rest. The material science, biology, is proving this ethical
truth. Recently Dr. Woods Hutchinson has shown that it does not take
even three generations to make a high-class man a “thoroughbred,” as
he terms it. If good food, light, air, proper clothing, and wholesome
recreation were extended to the masses, each generation would produce
its own “thoroughbreds” from the “common people.” He says: “Men
not only can but do get to be as able, as useful, and as desirable
citizens for the community, in every possible regard, in one generation
as they will ever get or are capable of becoming. Give the unspoiled,
warm-hearted mass of humanity a fair living chance—good food, fresh
air, sunshine, decent homes, no overwork, plenty of healthful
amusements—and you will reap a far larger crop not merely of happiness,
of justice, and of well-being, but also of geniuses, of great men and
of all leaders and illuminators than any nation can possibly utilize.”
Until the privilege-created aristocracy of other countries and
plutocracy of this country get off the backs of the people and cease
to exploit them by monopolies, there can be no complete and permanent
rest, for the “mania for owning things” possesses the rich, and the
fear of want makes restlessness for the poor. The burden-bearing masses
have not yet seen the cause of their burden, even though they feel its
intolerable weight at times and make efforts to throw it off. All this
deepens their unrest.
The very oneness of all life will put sound sleep and true rest ever
beyond the general reach until all are given equal opportunity in
Nature’s great gift to man, the Earth.
Then the worker, free of the taxes of rent and monopoly, free of
cut-throat competition forced by monopoly, would have some leisure
in which to use his brains and cultivate his affections; and
liberty—moral, intellectual, and economic—would be here.
Was it not something like this which Jesus had in mind when he said
“the Kingdom of God is at hand”? Did not he say that obedience to
the laws of the Universe would bring their own immediate and immense
reward? The kingdom and the peace of God is within our reach, did we
but realize it.