Poverty

Frederick Verinder: My Neighbor's Landmark: Short Studies in Bible Land Laws (1911), Chapter 1

It is natural enough that Moses and the Prophets should have a good deal to say, and for us to hear, on the Land Question. For, so long as man remains a land animal, the Lawgiver and the Social Reformer cannot avoid the ever-pressing question of the relation of man to land. Like some other ancient peoples (and some modern "savages"), the Hebrews saw clearly truths about the Land Question which have become obscured to most of us by the complexities of our modern industrial system. It is, of course, obvious that the details of the land laws which Moses promulgated, and to which the Prophets appealed, cannot apply to a nation so differently circumstanced as our own. In considering the details, we must constantly bear in mind the circumstances of the time and place, and the history and condition of the people. "The precepts then uttered," said one of the early Fathers of the Church, in discussing certain provisions of the Mosaic law, "had reference to the weakness of them who were receiving the laws; since also to be worshipped with the vapor of sacrifice is very unworthy of God, just as to lisp is unworthy of a philosopher. Do not thou then require their excellency now, when their use is past; but then when the time was calling for them." But the principles which underlay those "precepts" are fundamental and immutable, because the relation of man to the land on which he lives and works is always and essentially the same. The earth is still what one of the Apocryphal writers called it, "the mother of all things." Land is still, as it was in the time of Moses, the home and the workshop of the human race, the reservoir from which human labor draws all the raw materials wherewith to satisfy its needs. "Land is perpetual man." "One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever." The Pentateuchal tradition recognises, in what has been described as a "first attempt at organic chemistry," as clearly as the modern scientist does, that even the materials of which the human body is composed are drawn from the land and finally return to it.

It is, therefore, to the underlying principles of the Hebrew social philosophy, other than to the details of Mosaic legislation, that this little work is designed to call attention. Modern writers on the Land Question — Gerrard Winstanley the Digger, Spence of Newcastle, John Locke, William Ogilvie of Pittensea, Patrick Edward Dove, Herbert Spencer (in his earlier phase), Alfred Russel Wallace, and, above all, Henry George — have, after all, only restated, and attempted to apply to modern social needs, principles which were enunciated by Moses and enforced by many later Hebrew teachers. Some of them would have readily admitted this: would, indeed, have gloried in it. It is not without significance that one of Henry George's most telling and popular lectures had as its subject, "Moses." The great Hebrew liberation could hardly have found in our time a more fitting and sympathetic exposition.

But, ancient as these principles are, the most characteristic of modern problems — problems of poverty amid increasing wealth, of housing, of unemployment — are compelling the attention of social reformers, more and more, to them. For, what we call the Land Question remains essentially the same under everchanging forms of social organisation. When "the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground," He so formed him that he could live only upon and from the land whence he came. It is true, now as always (as Sir William Petty long ago put it in an arresting sentence), that "Land is the mother and Labor is the father of all wealth." Many centuries earlier, the writer of one of the Hebrew "wisdom books" had, as we have already seen, proclaimed the same truth. ... Read the whole chapter.

Frederick Verinder: My Neighbor's Landmark: Short Studies in Bible Land Laws (1911) —Chapter 5: Land, Labor and Learning

§ 5. The seventh year was also called the year of release, "partly because the land was "released" from cultivation, and partly because there was then a general remittance of all debts due from one Hebrew to another, and a manumission of all Hebrew bondservants. The war-cries of monopolists against reform in modern times would have been treated with scanty respect by Moses and the prophets. They recognised neither the right of the landlord to "do what he liked with his own," nor the "sacredness of (private) contract" made against public policy, nor the inalienable right of every (white) man to "whop his own nigger," or to sweat his own wage-slave. The Law aimed at making involuntary and undeserved poverty, as nearly as might be, impossible. When and where, through the vices or frailty of human nature, it crept in, temporarily and in spite of the Law, the most careful provision was made for mitigating its evils. ...

§ 8. To say that, in the seventh year, the Israelites attended a Bible class conducted by their clergy would be to use one of those dangerous phrases which completely misrepresent the facts of the case under the appearance of stating the bare, literal truth about them. It is true, of course, that the rolls of the "Laws of Moses" now form part of what we now call the Bible — the collection of ancient writings from which extracts are read in church services. The peculiar position so long assigned to these Hebrew writings in our own religion has prevented most Englishmen from realising what they meant to the Hebrews.

They were at once "sacred" and "secular." They assumed in every paragraph the existence of God; but He was a God who stood in direct, constant, and immediate relation to the life of the Nation "the God of thy fathers," "the Lord thy God which brought thee out of the house of bondage," the God who dwelt in the midst of Israel. Yet — not in spite of this, but because of it — the Hebrew writers hold, as strongly as any modern secularist, that "the affairs of this life and of this world demand, and will repay, our utmost care and attention." So completely free from any trace of "other-worldliness" is the Hebrew Torah, that a good bishop once deduced an argument in favor of the inspiration of the Pentateuch from the fact that it contains no reference to a life after death. The future life to which the Law points as the result and the reward of rightdoing is the ideal life of a free and industrious Commonwealth, in which every citizen, secure in the enjoyment of the produce of his labor, surrounded by stalwart sons and comely daughters, sits under his own vine and his own fig tree, none daring to make him afraid "in the land which the Lord thy God hath given thee."

The Law contained not only the elaborate ritual of the sacrifices and the liturgy of the Jewish religion, but the biographies of their national heroes, and the history of the Nation itself. The primitive science of the infant Commonwealth lay in it side by side with the laws of their minstrels and an outline of civil and criminal law. The same collection of documents which told them how the voice of God called upon Moses from the burning bush to organise a general strike against the Egyptian taskmasters, claimed also that the skill of the handicraftsman, no less than the wisdom of the legislator, was due to Divine inspiration. If the Law regulated with minute care the vestments of the high-priests, it was no less careful of the foods of the people. It prescribed in detail the lavish ornaments of the Tabernacle, the outward symbol of national unity, but it also told the citizen how to keep his person, his clothing, and his house clean and healthy. It insisted upon man's duty to God, but no less upon man's duty to his fellows. With a magnificent impartiality it denounced a curse upon the idolater, who rebelled against the majesty of the Most High, and upon the remover of the landmark, who invaded the equal right of his neighbor. The "statutes and judgments of Moses" were the Acts of the Parliament and the case-law of the Hebrew Commonwealth. Whole chapters in Numbers and Joshua are filled with dry lists of names, which were once full of the same kind of interest and significance to the Hebrew reader as Doomsday Book or the Census returns or Mr. Lloyd-George's Land Valuation have to students of English social history.

To the Hebrew, therefore, the study of "all the words of this Law," enjoined in every seventh year, and made possible by the just land system which the sabbatical institutions safeguarded, was, for his time and place, a liberal education. To place within the reach of the English worker, once in every seven years, a year's course at a university in science and law and literature and theology, would be something like the modern equivalent for one of the advantages which the sabbath year offered to the ancient Hebrew. Read the whole chapter, including footnotes

Frederick Verinder: My Neighbor's Landmark: Short Studies in Bible Land Laws (1911) — Appendix

A. The Encroachments of Injustice

The setting up of a privileged class —

"He (the King) will take your fields, and your vineyards and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants. And He will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give them to his officers,309 and to his servants. And he will take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young men,310 and your asses, and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of your sheep, and ye shall be his servants. And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king, which ye shall have chosen you" (1 Sam. 8:14-18; cp. Ezek. 46:16-18; Jer. 22:13-17, on which see above, Chap. 7 § 3).

"Thy princes are rebellious, and companions of thieves: every one loveth gifts [i.e. bribes], and followeth after rewards: they judge not the fatherless, neither does the cause of the widow come unto them. Therefore saith the Lord, the Lord of hosts, the mighty One of Israel, Ah, I will ease Me of Mine adversaries, and avenge Me of Mine enemies" (Isa. 1:23, 24).

— leads to land monopoly —

"The Lord standeth up to plead, and standeth to judge the people. The Lord will enter into judgment with the ancients of His people, and the princes thereof: for ye have eaten up the vineyard; the spoil of the poor is in your houses. What mean ye that ye beat My people to pieces, and grind the faces of the poor? saith the Lord God of hosts"(Isa. 3:13-15).

"Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no room, and ye be made to dwell alone in the midst of the earth!" (Isa. 5:8 [R.V.]; cp. Mic. 2, 3, on which see above, Chap. 3. § 10).

"Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees, and that write grievousness which they have prescribed; to turn aside the needy from judgment, and to take away the right from the poor of My people, that widows may be their prey, and that they may rob the fatherless" (Isa. 10: 1, 2). ...

The parlous plight of the poor.

"The destruction of the poor is their poverty" (Prov. 10:15).

"Remember, O Lord, what is come upon us:
Behold, and see our reproach.
Our inheritance is turned unto strangers,
Our houses unto aliens.
We are orphans and fatherless,
Our mothers are as widows.
We have drunken our water for money;
Our wood is sold unto us.
Our pursuers are upon our necks:
We are weary, and have no rest" (Lam. 5:1-5 [R.V.]).

"The needy shall not always be forgotten,
Nor the expectation of the poor perish for ever" (Ps. 9:18). ... Read the whole appendix, including footnotes

Henry George: Moses — Apostle of Freedom (1878 speech, San Francisco)

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