No class in the community can grow steadily richer without causing other
classes to grow relatively poorer. The two tendencies are halves of the
same process. If a larger and larger percentage of the land falls into
the possession of a given institution, it is mathematically demonstrable
that a greater number of individuals must remain landless and homeless,
and that the cost of access to the remaining land in the community must
become greater and greater, making it harder and harder for the common
citizen to live. Untaxed property in any community adds heavily to the
common burden.
That this is not mere speculation may be seen by a glance at history,
where it will be found in land after land, and in century after
century, that favoritism to the church, wherever tolerated, has wrought
incalculable evil to the people, largely through the heavy accumulation
of wealth by the ecclesiastical body. So unendurable has the condition
become that in country after country the only possible relief was found
to be through wholesale confiscation, thus settling accounts at one
stroke. Thus, Henry VIII of England became a reformer in spite of
himself, and though personally a dishonest tyrant with few if any
redeeming features, at least conferred a lasting blessing on the people
of England by forcing the church parasites to disgorge enormous values
which had become means of the most intolerable oppression. France and
Portugal, though for centuries staunch Catholic countries, found
the wealth of the church and the impoverishment of the people to go
regularly hand in hand, and were finally forced, in decreeing the
separation of church and state, to adopt stringent measures for breaking
the monopolistic power of the hierarchy. The Philippine insurrection
against Spain was largely an uprising of an outraged people against the
priests and friars, who were coming to own everything, and to reduce the
population to a state of vassalage. The part played by the priesthood
of Mexico in the impoverishment of the people, while the church revenues
waxed greater and greater, is familiar to all who are acquainted with
the causes which have brought that unhappy land to a state of chaos and
wholesale bloodshed.