The representative. [volume] (St. Paul, Minn.) 1893-1901, 1899-01-11
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ering in the land, and there preach act
ual obedience to the sermon on the
mount, declaring that we must actually
do what Jesus said, l would commit a
religious scandal; l would henceforth
be held in dlsrepute by the official re-
ligion that bears Jesus name.
II the head of some great oil combina-
ton, though it had violated every law
Of God and man, besides the so-called
economic laws which neither God nor
man ever had anything to do with, and
though it had debauched our nation in
finitely beyond the moral shock of the
civil war, were to stand before any rep
resentative religious gathering with an
endowment check in his hand he would
be greeted with an applause so vocifer-
GUS as to partake of the morally idiotic.
And, mind you, the condemnation of the
miserable spectacle rests not upon the
monopolist, but upon ourselves; upon
those of us who worship at his shrine,
and teach and preach by the grace of
his endowments.
The immortality Of private ownership
cannot take refuge in legal enactments.
Legal ownership rests upon force and
not upon ethics; nor can great private
ownership be said to grow out of the
profitable use of public resources. There
has never been such thing as profit.
Tho oh,
profit theoretically springs, is a pure
fiction. Profit is form of forcibly ap-
propriating the produce of the labor of
others, historical device for using hui
man beings as the creatures of private
interest.
Precisely such form of force is the
wage system, which Prof. Letourneau
calls the last evolution of slavery. Let
the intent of the wagemaster be as
benevolent as it may the wage system
is through and through a slave system
in it's essence. They who possess the
worlds resources have mankind at their
mercy, its very freedom tc think and
breathe, with a certainty that no Caesar
ever dreamed of. If a few men own the
earth, we can live on the earth only on
their terms. The armies of emperors
and conquerors are mushrooms as COM
pared with the armies of dollars which
human beings must have or starve. 1t
it's dread shadow of universal empire
over a fearful and anxious world that
wage-earners are building for their mas
ters, good and bad alike
1t follows, then, that the public owner
ship of the sources and means of pro-
duction is the sole answer to the social
question and the sole basis of spiritual
liberty. Private ownership of public re-
sources is private ownership of human
beings. The common ownership of the
earth is the only ground upon which
true property and liberty can be built,
the only soil in which individuality can
take root. Liberty, as a human fact,
means communism in natural resources,
democracy in production, equality in use,
QIlNdCo " OpcI ~ Ill consumption, anu IliC
responsibility of each for all and all for
each.
The economic liberty which secures
equality Of opportunity is the only
ground on which man can achieve his
destiny of organized love. The produc-
tion and distribution of wealth for the
common good will prove to be the high
est form of spiritual liberty yet attained.
The quest for this spiritual liberty is
the motive by which the social drama
must be interpreted, and the spirit of
private ownership is the villain in the
drama.