The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 1911. 1. THE CHURCH AND SOCIALISM

New Zealand Tablet, 9 November 1911, Page 2253

The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 1911. 1. THE CHURCH AND SOCIALISM

J.VV ——*—“— ■ NORTH Island Socialist —who has an Irish name but who is not a subscriber to this THm paperhas sent us a communication which is by way of being an answer to an article QZwJTq on Very Rev. Prior McNabb and the New Socialism ’ which appeared in our issue of September 21. In reality, however, the letter is in no sort a reply to the article referred to. The writer of the latter was concerned with one main pointnamely, whether Prior McNabb was right in his contention that Socialism, as defined by Mr. Ramsay Macdonald in his recent publication, no longer came under the strictures uttered against the system by Leo XIII. in his famous Encyclical on Labor, or whether, on the contrary, the learned Prior had misconstrued, or had failed to take in all the bearings of, Mr. Ramsay Macdonald’s definition, ‘ A Socialist has not one word to say regarding either Mr. Ramsay Macdonald or Prior McNabb,

but roams at large over the whole question of Socialism. His letter, however, will serve us as a text for a'few remarks on the subject,which will, at least, be opportune, and which may, perhaps, be found useful. The writer stresses, as most Socialists do, the appalling extremes of wealth . and poverty which exist under present conditions; and asks, if the Church condemns Socialism, what remedy she ; offers to take its place. We propose to discuss the subject in three articles; in which it will be our object to show (1) First, by way of preliminary, that Catholic writers have been quite as fully alive to, and quite as strong in their denunciation of, the wrongs of the existing system as our Socialist friends have been. (2) Secondly, we purpose to indicate some of the grounds for the criticism and condemnation which Socialists, by their own utterances, have brought upon themselves from Catholic writers. And (3) in the third article, we propose to outline some of the alternative methods of social reform which have been put forward by representative Catholics. ' * For the present, then, in this brief introduction to the discussion, our task is merely that of selection and quotation from acknowledged Catholic authorities,, in proof of our assertion that Catholic writers have been just as vigorous, and just as unanimous in their protest against the anomalies of the existing system as Socialists themselves have been. And we begin with' what is, for us, the highest authority of —the voice of the Sovereign Pontiff himself. In his great Encyclical (lierum Novarum) on Labor, issued more than twenty years ago, the late Holy Father, Leo XIII., placed in the very forefront of his deliverance the following declaration: All agree, and there can be no question whatever, that some remedy must be found; and quickly found, for the misery and wretchedness which press so heavily at this moment on the large majority of the very poor. The ancient workmen's Guilds were destroyed in the last century, and no other organisation took their place. .institutions and the laws have repudiated the ancient religion. Hence by degrees it has come to pass that Working Men have been given over, isolated and defenceless, to the callousness of employers and the greed of unrestrained competition. The evil has been increased by rapacious Usury which, although more than once condemned by the Church, is nevertheless, under a different form, but with the same guilt, still practised by avaricious and grasping men. And to this must be added the custom of working by contract, and the concentration of so many branches of trade in the hands of a few individuals, so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the masses of the poor a yoke-little better than slavery itself.' Again, towards the close of the Encyclical, his Holiness says: The first concern (in things exterior and corporal) is to save the poor workers from the cruelty of grasping speculators, who use human _ beings as mere instruments for making money. It is neither justice nor humanity so to grind men down with excessive labor as to stupefy their minds and wear out their bodies.' Here is a protest as earnest and weighty as any ever penned by any Socialist—against the inhuman abuses which havedeveloped under our present industrial system. * And this protest fairly represents the attitude of Catholic authors of repute in every land. For our present purpose it will suffice to take only typical English writers. The Rev. Joseph Rickaby, S.J., Professor of Ethics and Natural Law at Stonyhurst College, and one of the most influential and widelyread of our contemporary Catholic authors, in- a brochure on Socialism published in 1887, has the following : 'The sacred rights of property—yes, but there is something even more sacred than property, the lives and happiness of mankind. ... To parody a famous saying, property now is on its trial. If the existence of Dives is a benefit to Lazarus according to the order of nature, then well and good, Dives may-be converted, and maintained in his estate; but if his existence is a benefit to no one but himself, so much the worse for Dives in the time that is coming on earth,

Let us sit down, and count if we can the sores of our modern Lazarus. His food is insufficient; he has been starved from childhood. Short allowance of milk in infancy (two pennyworth a week among five children); short allowance: of meat; food generally innutritious, ill-cooked, and unwholesome. From bad food has come an unsound constitution and proneness to disease. His house is a coffin-home, close, fetid, deadly to health, and deadly to morality, by reason of the overcrowding. His work, when he had any, was unhealthy, done in a tainted atmosphere of dust and steam and effluvia of all sorts, from early dawn to sundown. But now lie is out of work he was shut out at the shortest notice, because his employer had gotten hold of a new contrivance that rendered men unnecessary, and so he was cast adrift, and he has drifted about for months, ' doing odd jobs,' from bad to worse, till now he is within measurable distance of a pauper's grave. Yet he has been no idle man. He worked so long as work was to be had; and in his day he did work enough to have kept him and his ■ children well clothed and fed till such time as his children should have been able to support him in their turn; but another has taken the profit of his toil.' Representative Catholic laymen voice the same sentiment of utter dissatisfaction with existing conditions. Amongst Catholic lay writers, no name stands higher as an authority on economic questions than that of C. S. Devas, M.A., sometime examiner in Political Economy at -the Royal University of Ireland, author of A Manned of Political Economy, The Key to the World's Progress, etc. Writing on Socialism, he says: 'Most truly the evils (of the present time) are terrible and pressing: the miserable dwellings of so large a number of our people in town and country, the cruel advantage taken of weak, unorganised labor, the uncertainty of employment, the frequent triumph of dishonesty, the poverty-stricken old age that for so many is the dreary prospect ahead. But who recognised these evils more clearly than Pope Leo XIII. ? Who told us more clearly than he that we are not to leave these things as they are?' Mr. Hilaire Belloc, late M.P. for Salford, and one of the most brilliant Catholic writers of the day, recognises to the full the economic and industrial evils under which the English workers are suffering. From a lengthy treatment of the subject, we select a few specimen sentences As things now are in England, a small proportion of the inhabitants of the country possess by 'far the greater part of the means of production. ... I think one may say that less than two hundred families at the very most control one-quarter of our means of production. Another quarter is in the hands of perhaps two thousand families at the most. And the remaining half (unless we are to include properties so small that they hardly count as capital) cannot at the utmost be made to include as much, as a sixteenth of the whole community. . . . Thus a great and increasing proportion of the population . . . has no share in the permanent wealth of the country, and can only enjoy what it does on condition of continual labour for others who own that permanent wealth; while the workers, though not perhaps becoming actually _ poorer, are becoming relatively poorer compared with the owning classes, and with all this they are less and less secure of permanent employment as trade competition extends over a wider and wider area of the world's surface.' * We began this series of citations with a quotation from a Pope; we may fittingly end it with an utterance from a Cardinal. Taking up the latest book to hand on the subject— Catholic Ideals in Social Life, by Father Cuthbert, O.S.F.C.,—we find quoted in its pages the following powerful indictment by the late Cardinal Vaughan of the ' inordinate growth of selfish individualism,' which is the, characteristic feature of our modern commercial system. Speaking of the ' lamentable state of the masses of our poor,' the late Cardinal said: The suppression of the monasteries and the guilds, the transference of their lands and of the great commons of England to the rich,

created a lackland and beggared poor. . . .Without ties to bind the people to the land, they have been driven, especially of late years, in ever-increasing multitudes to the towns. Here they have herded apart from the better classes, forming an atmosphere and a society marked, on the one hand by an absence of all elevating influences of wealth, education, and -refinement, and on the other by the depressing presence of almost' a dead level of poverty, ignorance, and squalor. They are not owners either of the scraps of land on which they live or of the tenements that cover them; but are rack-rented by the agents of absentee landlords, who know less of them than Dives knew of Lazarus. . . . Millions of human creatures are housed worse than the cattle and horses of many a lord and 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 shamelessly packed together.' * " " Our quotations have run into a greater length than we had intended; but the subject is a timely and important one, and it is just as well to treat it comprehensively when we are dealing with it. We have, at any rate, advanced sufficient evidence, we think, to show that whatever position the Church may hold in regard to Socialism, her attitude is certainly not based on any want of recognition of existing evils, nor on any lack of sympathy with the great mass of the people on whom the heavy burden of those evils principally falls. '""- ■;