Yet the great concern of Moses was with the duty that lay plainly before
him; the effort to lay the foundations of a social state in which deep poverty
and
degrading want should be unknown – where people released from the
meaner struggles that waste human energy should have opportunity for intellectual
and moral development.
Here stands out the greatness of the man. What was the wisdom and stretch
of the forethought that in the desert sought to guard in advance against the
dangers of a settled state, let the present speak!
In the full blaze of the nineteenth century, when every child in our schools
may know as common truths things of which the Egyptian sages never dreamed;
when the earth has been mapped and the stars have been weighed; when steam
and electricity have been pressed into our service, and science is wresting
from nature secret after secret – it is but natural to look back
upon the wisdom of three thousand years ago as an adult looks back upon
the learning
of a child.
And yet, for all this wonderful increase of knowledge, for all this enormous
gain of productive power, where is the country in the civilised world in
which today there is not want and suffering – where the masses are not condemned
to toil that gives no leisure, and all classes are not pursued by a greed of
gain that makes life an ignoble struggle to get and to keep? Three thousands
years of advances, and still the moan goes up: "They have made our lives
bitter with hard bondage, in mortar and in brick, and in all manner of service!" Three
thousand years of advances! and the piteous voices of little children are
in the moan.
Standing as I stand, where modern ideas have had fullest, freest development;
in the newest great city of the newest great nation; by the side of that ultimate
sea, where ends the westward march of the race that has circled the globe,
and farthest west meets east, the cool shades and sweet waters whose promise
has so long lured us on seem dissolving into mocking mirage.
Over ocean wastes far wider than the Syrian desert we have sought our promised
land – no narrow strip between the mountains and the sea, but a wide
and virgin continent. Here, in greater freedom, with vaster knowledge and fuller
experience, we are building up a nation that leads the van of modern progress.
And yet while we prate of the rights of humanity there are already many among
us thousands who find it difficult to assert the first of natural rights – the
right to earn an honest living; thousands who from time to time must accept
of degrading charity or starve.
We boast of equality before the law; yet notoriously justice is deaf to the
call of those who have no gold and blind to the sin of those who have.
We pride ourselves upon our common schools; yet after our boys and girls
are educated we vainly ask: "What shall we do with them?" And about
our colleges children are growing up in vice and crime, because from their
homes
poverty has driven all refining influences. We pin our faith to universal
suffrage; yet with all power in the hands of the people, the control of public
affairs
is passing into the hands of a class of professional politicians, and our
governments are, in many cases, becoming but a means for robbery of the people.
We have prohibited hereditary distinctions, we have forbidden titles of nobility;
yet there is growing up an aristocracy of wealth as powerful and merciless
as any that ever held sway.
We progress and we progress; we girdle continents with iron roads
and knit cities together with the mesh of telegraph wires; each day brings
some new
invention, each year marks a fresh advance – the power of production
increased, and the avenues of exchange cleared and broadened. Yet the complaint
of "hard times" is louder and louder; everywhere are people harassed
by care, and haunted by the fear of want. With swift, steady strides and prodigious
leaps, the power of human hands to satisfy human wants advances and advances,
is multiplied and multiplied. Yet the struggle for mere existence is more and
more intense, and human labour is becoming the cheapest of commodities. Beside
glutted warehouses human beings grow faint with hunger and shiver with cold;
under the shadow of churches festers the vice that is born of want.
Trace to its roots the cause that is producing want in the midst of plenty,
ignorance in the midst of intelligence, aristocracy in democracy, weakness
in strength – that is giving to our civilisation a one-sided and unstable
development – and you will find it something which this Hebrew statesman
three thousand years ago perceived and guarded against.
Moses saw that the real cause of the enslavement of the masses of Egypt
was – what
has everywhere produced enslavement – the possession by a class of land
upon which and from which the whole people must live. He saw that to permit
in land the same unqualified private ownership that by natural right attaches
to the things produced by labour, would be inevitably to separate the people
into the very rich and the very poor, inevitably to enslave labour – to
make the few the masters of the many, no matter what the political forms,
to bring vice and degradation no matter what the religion.
And with the foresight of the philosophic statesman who legislates not for
the need of a day, but for all the future, he sought, in ways suited to his
times and conditions, to guard against this error.
Everywhere in the Mosaic institutions is the land treated as the gift of
the Creator to His common creatures, which no one has the right to monopolise.
Everywhere it is, not your estate, or your property, not the land which
you
bought, or the land which you conquered, but "the land which the Lord
thy God giveth thee" – "the land which the Lord lendeth thee".
And by practical legislation, by regulations to which he gave the highest sanctions,
he tried to guard against the wrong that converted ancient civilisations into
despotisms – the wrong that in after centuries ate out the heart
of Rome, that produced the imbruting serfdom of Poland and the gaunt misery
of Ireland,
the wrong that is today filling American cities with idle men, and our
virgin states with tramps.
He not only provided for a redistribution of the land among the people,
and for making it fallow and common every seventh year, but by the institution
of the Jubilee he provided for a redistribution of the land every fifty
years, and made monopoly impossible. ... Read the whole speech