Archdeacon Cunningham: The Moral Witness of the Church on the Investment of Money, pp. 25, 26.
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clutches of the usurers and middlemen, loading him with taxes and forcing him to enter into competition with people who easily overpowered him? Who could ever gather from these histories that from 1793 onwards in France, the right of private property became far more rigorous and absolute than it had ever been? But such are the facts. Now the history of the so-called historical period reveals a picture not of private ownership, nor of Communism, but of a blend of the two, marked by a hardening of the right of individual ownership as each society approaches its decadence. In the period of growth and development, when institutions are flourishing, we never see an enforcement of private ownership in all things, as was customary in the later period of Rome, and as is customary to-day in Western Europe and England, but we do find private ownership of some things as an essential part of the civilization, and this is so whether we turn to Judah, to China, to Egypt, to Greece, Rome or mediaeval Europe. The early legislators seem always to have been eager to combine communal or conditional, with private and absolute ownership, and as fast as the latter form encroached on the former in each nation, the nearer the civilization approached disintegration. An extremely impressive instance of this is to be found in the history of the Jews. After the return of the exiles from their captivity in Babylon in the sixth century B.C., and their rebuilding of the Temple, it was found that the community they formed in Judah, which was nothing but an insignificant little Persian province, soon developed all the injustices and symptoms of oppression inseparable from uncontrolled conditions of wealth. Side by side with the respected families with old traditions, there had grown up a new capitalist class who lent money to the poorer
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among the returned exiles, for the purposes of house-building, buying seed and the payment of the King's tribute; and as security for this they accepted the arable land, the vineyards and olive-groves of the debtor, and sometimes even the debtor himself and his children. In a few years this system led to the existence of a plutocracy on the one hand, and on the other a wholly dispossessed class, many members of which had been reduced to the position of serfs. Now the Israelites, as a people, had always shown the greatest horror of just such a state of affairs as this. It is explicitly stated in Deuteronomy that no Israelite should exploit a member of his own community in this way. "Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother; usury of money, usury of victuals, usury of anything that is lent upon usury." And there follows the perfectly justifiable reservation with regard to strangers, in dealing with whom there can be no intra-herd duties, which implied that usury is not wrong in itself, but only wrong as against a fellow-citizen. "Unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury; but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury." When, therefore, Nehemiah, who was above all a patriot, heard the lamentations of the oppressed, and saw the kind of social conditions that had been created in Judah by these people of his own race, who had set out from Babylon with such pure and lofty intentions, he was very angry, and rebuked the nobles and the rulers, and "set a great assembly against them." And he commanded them saying "I pray you let us leave off this usury. Restore, I pray you, unto them even this day, their lands, their vineyards, their oliveyards and their houses, also the hundredth part of the money, and of the corn, the wine, and the oil, that ye exact of them." And they did so.
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Nehemiah himself set the example, and refused, and made his own servants refuse, to exact the smallest tribute for any help he had given; and thus the law triumphed over self-interest, and a sort of redistribution of property was effected which struck even at the priests, who were made to take an oath to restore property confiscated for debt, just as the plutocrats had done. In China the Feudal System lasted under the Chow Dynasty for 866 years (1122 to 256 B.C.); but as the system degenerated into one of absolute private ownership, disorder, anarchy and internecine wars occurred, and for the last 500 years of this dynasty China was in a state of complete confusion. Up to the time of the sixth century B.C. or probably a little earlier (for the process was gradual) it was impossible for anyone to accumulate unlimited wealth. But the speed with which similar evils call forth similar remedies, is shown by the fact that no later than the fifth century B.C., that is to say, about a century after the introduction of money, and therefore of the means of accumulating wealth, the Chinese were already recommending the control of capital. In Egypt the system was also feudal, but the fact that, from time to time, the Pharaohs had to intervene in order to buy back from rapacious landlords land that had become private property, and were obliged to have recourse to a redistribution, shows that here, too, the tendency of the blend of private and communal or conditional ownership, to degenerate into purely private ownership, was regarded as a danger and had to be checked by redistribution. In Greece we encounter the same dangerous development and the same remedies. Solon, Pericles, Lycurgus and Agis, each in turn had recourse to redistribution to try to avert catastrophe, while throughout the history of Athens we are constantly reminded of the
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conditional nature of the original proprietary rights and of the sound prejudice against excessive accumulation, by the innumerable services imposed upon and expected of the rich. They were expected at great expense to maintain and train the choruses for festivals and to defray the expenses of other annual "liturgies" or public services. They were not only subjected to capital levies, but were also made to serve as trierarchs, which meant that they had to keep a vessel and its fittings in good repair, and to compensate the State if the vessel was lost or damaged through negligence. They were, moreover, bound to defray the expense of the embassies which, from time to time, were despatched to attend some festival outside Athens, or to consult the oracle. In this way the Athenian democracy not only financed its national administration, but also tried to prevent gross accumulations of property in private hands, and the fact that they succeeded is shown by the nomination of trierarchs at different periods. At the beginning of the Peloponnesian War the Athenians were able to nominate 400 men annually, each of whom was rich enough to maintain one ship for a year, but later on it was possible to find only couples or whole companies who could meet this charge. In Rome the development was slightly different. The history of property in Rome, as I have already pointed out, reveals a steady encroachment of absolute private ownership upon conditional ownership, or ownership bound up with duties and obligations, with the consequent accumulation of large fortunes in the hands of a few irresponsible people, and all the resulting evils of such a condition. It is true that the bulk of the ultimate private owners of the land had either descended, or had bought their land, from the possessores, i.e. men who had only conditional or usufructuary rights granted by the community as a
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whole. But when the two Gracchi attempted, by their Agrarian Laws, to effect an equitable redistribution of lands, these mere possessores, who had no rights of private ownership in the land, protested as if Tiberius and Gaius were perpetrating an act of robbery; the reforms attempted by these brothers came to nothing, and by 111 B.C. nearly all the land, which had been public property, had passed into private hands. And just as England, thanks to the enormous development of her industries and wealth began to be able, after the sixteenth century, to support a huge and increasing population of dispossessed people without too much material hardship, or, at any rate, without enough of it to cause an upheaval, so Rome, after 167 B.C. was able to abolish the tributum civium Romanorum, and gradually to complete the conversion of conditional or communal, into private land tenure, without causing an insurrection among its despoiled and impoverished citizens, whom it fed and amused gratuitously. Other small redistributions of land occurred under Cæsar, Nerva and Septimius Severus, while the last remains of cultivated public lands in Italy were sold or given away by the Flavian Emperors. Thus, although the right of absolute ownership appears to have become universal comparatively early in Rome, vestiges of a system of conditional ownership survived in a rough and disorganized form. The fact that under the Republic the city magistrates served without pay, were expected frequently to devote large sums from their private purses to the celebration of games, and that State lands were originally occupied and cultivated by merely usufructuary tenants, while, in the early Empire, individual Romans willingly undertook tasks (upkeep of public buildings, drainage in and outside the city, the repair of roads, bridges and harbours) which would other-
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wise have been a very heavy burden on the public treasury, shows that the association of private wealth with certain public obligations was an essential feature of the culture, though perhaps not so marked as it was in Greece. In mediaeval Europe, the Feudal System gathered up and organized all that was best in the institutions of the ancient world, relating to property, and evolved an intricate and decentralized form of administration, consisting of graduated privileges and obligations extending without a break from the serf to the presiding monarch. Nothing in any way as desirable had been evolved in Greece or Rome. It provided leisure for the rulers, with a recognition of the need of that leisure and of the benefits accruing to the nation as a whole from the possibility of such leisure. It provided defence and revenue, and allowed for all the advantages of private property without ever tolerating absolute and irresponsible ownership in the principal means of production then known, which was the land. Even the Church lands, themselves, were always supposed to be held in trust for the poor. The position of the rulers was so far from being a sinecure that they could be called upon to risk life and limb for the protection of their dependants and their king, to consult with their dependants and superiors concerning local and national policy, to administer justice, to guarantee a certain military contingent adequately armed and equipped, to maintain law and order in their locality, and to control and perform any number of other duties which made up the life of an agricultural landlord of the period. In fact, there can hardly be any doubt that, in its early stages, before the privileges of leadership were well denned, the duties of the chief or lord under the Feudal System were so heavy with responsibility that, not only were men reluctant to undertake them
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(just as in all hierarchies, including the Church, the Army and the Navy to-day, men are found who decline promotion out of fear of increased responsibility) but the communities, who wanted chiefs, were also prepared to make substantial sacrifices in order to lure candidates. Such sacrifices probably consisted of corvées, willingly performed, so as to secure the chief the necessary leisure; good quarters urgently pressed upon him, so as to supply him not only with comfort, but also and principally with suitable accommodation for the discharge of his many public duties in a dignified and adequate manner; and probably, too, hereditary rights of chieftainship. In any case, the final outcome was an organization of property, in which the form of tenure, by which a thing of value was held, was one of voluntary service, not intended to be chiefly economic in character, but rather moral and political. The principle of mutual obligation and loyalty, protection and service, bound together all ranks of society, from the lowest to the highest; and, while nothing in the form of irresponsible and absolute individual ownership existed, at least in the means of production, the right of private property was nevertheless sufficiently conceded, to lend adequate freedom and dignity to the life of the individual, and to provide for the adequate development of character. Not one scrap of that feudal property could be transferred indiscriminately without the risk of destroying its value — so much so, that every possible precaution was taken to secure similar individuals to hold it, when any of it became available through death or some other cause. Contrary to Hume's hasty assumption concerning the transference of what he termed "external" goods, it could not be transferred without suffering any loss or alteration unless men similar to its original holders could be found
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to take it over. And it was this fact that gave to the lord those powers over the marriage of heiresses and widows, and over the alienation of property which, to later generations, have seemed so oppressive and unjust. The fact that Hume, in the early eighteenth century, was able actually to define "external" property as of that kind which can be transferred without loss or alteration, is the most enlightening proof of the change in point of view which had come over England since the close of the feudal period. The break up of Feudalism was due to an infinite number of causes, some avoidable, others unavoidable — at least to the men of the period; but, from our present point of view, all that we need remark is that the encroachment of absolute, irresponsible individual ownership upon conditional ownership, or ownership based upon obligations and duties, marked the process of disintegration, and that this process of disintegration did not lead, and has not yet led, to any attempt at reinstating a system of responsible proprietary rights, of graduated loyalties and obligations, of graduated service and privilege, which, in Feudalism made the position of the lowest in the land not only as secure but also as essential as that of his immediate and remotest superior. The onrush of the new system, the system of irresponsible proprietary rights, which received so important an impetus from Henry VIII and has lasted until the present day, was firmly resisted by Elizabeth and Charles I, each of whom took steps to control capital, to prevent it from accumulating in a few hands, and to impose upon the new, independent rich certain duties towards the community. In fact Charles I may be said to have sacrificed his head in the prosecution of these three aims. But in favour
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of the new order, promoting and defending it, were too many liberated human passions, too many powerful and venal motives; and ultimately, behind the imposing facade of religious fervour, and an alleged deep concern for the liberties of the People, the party in favour of laisser-faire — for that is what it amounted to — won the day. With rapid strides, the foundations of the present capitalistic system were completed, and in the few years that separated the Long Parliament's struggle with Charles I for a free hand, and the passing of one or two statutes in Charles II's reign, which extended the capitalists' policy to the land, the new era was successfully launched. From that day there remained but two possible means of attaching social obligations to property — taxation, which is merely expropriation, has no bearing on character, loyalty and honour, and fails to functionalize privilege and property; 1 andcharity, which was always indiscriminate, which owing to the necessity, or the tradition, of urging it by appeals to pity, was always directed to the support and promotion of the most degenerate and least desirable elements in the nation, and which, with the prevailing anarchy in the administration and testamentary disposal of property, was bound to lead to a hopeless squandering of the national wealth (particularly by women) on the most unwise foundations and institutions. This failure displayed by later usages and institutions to attach to rank and privilege a corresponding obligation and function, while at the same time they hardened the right of individual ownership and resolutely universalized the "external" goods that
1 Certain services, of course, did remain, which, although not legally exigible, were nevertheless loyally rendered by the bulk of the English propertied class. I refer to the work of magistrates, the participation in politics, etc., though these duties were probably undertaken from motives more often of self-protection than of patriotism. For evidence of this, see my Defence of Aristocracy.
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could be owned, constitutes one of the most distressing and perplexing features of the modern Age. For the absoluteness of private ownership in everything led, in modern Capitalism, to consequences that ought to have been foreseen and guarded against — the accumulation of vast wealth in a few hands, irresponsibility in the administration and the testamentary disposal of that wealth, a huge body of dispossessed, who are often deprived, in a society approving of private ownership on moral grounds, of the benefits of private ownership, and a commercial and industrial regimen of these dispossessed, which is almost always anonymous and unseen (the French logically call Limited Liability Companies, Sociétés anonymes). Now the frantic efforts to save Capitalism by recourse to indiscriminate confiscation in the form of heavy taxation, and by sentimentality in the form of indiscriminate charity, fails, and must fail, because such methods have no organizing power, are quite anonymous or impersonal, do nothing to knit the various strata of the nation together, and are, moreover, wasteful and mischievous. For while indiscriminate taxation does not guard against the possibility of seriously depreciating or even destroying property by here and there removing it from owners who administer it exceptionally well; charity, which deliberately shuts out all thought of the farmer's attitude to the weeds in his precious crop, stands for sacrifice to the cripples, mental defectives, incurables, lunatics and degenerates of all kinds, as if this were necessarily good and desirable, and good not only for the nation as a whole, but also for the individual, whose passport into society almost depends upon the amount of iodoform-laden air he has recently inhaled.
5. From this brief sketch of history we seem justified in concluding:
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That great civilizations and great peoples have without exception been observers of the right of private ownership. That everywhere this right has been to some extent limited, particularly in regard to the land. That the cupidity, acquisitiveness and short-sightedness of man tends gradually in weak societies to convert any form of conditional ownership, or ownership bound up with duties, into private and absolute ownership, and that this is always a sign of political decay. That wherever and whenever absolute private ownership has been extended to every possible form of goods, or property, and has led to the accumulation of vast fortunes in a few hands, and the creation of a class wholly dispossessed and dependent in a wholly non-functional way, disintegration has always threatened. That at such moments of crisis, the efforts of ancient legislators — Nehemiah, Solon, Pericles, Lycurgus, Agis, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, to mention only a few — have always been to avert disaster by trying to restore to the majority those very benefits, which are the sole basis for the persistence of individual ownership as an institution. That the grand experiment of mediaeval Europe in the art of combining all the privileges of private ownership with those of conditional ownership and duty, and of organizing the two on a basis of graduated rank and responsibility, mutual loyalty and obligation, must seem to us rather like a reaction after the long spell of "free" proprietorship which spread throughout the Roman Empire as the result of Roman Law, and at the same time as a development of some of the hardest lessons learned by the man of antiquity. That in the comparatively recent system called Capitalism, in which the irresponsible administration
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of wealth, combined with large accumulations of it in a few hands, is accompanied by the existence of a vast multitude of disinherited or destitute people, we find the recurrence of abuses and errors, which are leading to a fresh crisis, in the anticipation of which the masses are again being taught both by doctrinaires and circumstances, to call the institution of private property in question. Finally, that after each phase of universalized private ownership and irresponsibility there has followed a reaction in which the very right of private property has been put in question, and that in its purely social and political aspects Christianity was merely one of these reactions. Thus Capitalism and Communism are now at each other's throats, in both the international and intranational sense. Capitalism is a condition in which the best administrator of property in excess of a man's physical and professional needs, and the best testamentary disposer of such property, is assumed to be the person who happens adventitiously to be in possession of it. This is nonsense. Communism is a condition in which the best administrator of property is assumed to be the central Government. This also is nonsense. These two forms of nonsense are now at death grips. It behoves us, if we wish to save our civilization, to find a way out of this absurd duel between these two forms of nonsense, and in order to do this we must be quite clear regarding what is happening. Against the increasing burdens of taxation, which is really expropriation and therefore partial Communism, it is no longer any good trying to harden the right of private property either philosophically or legally; because it is precisely the hardening of
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the right of individual ownership that has provoked expropriation and partial Communism. Furthermore, against the claims of Communism it is no good for the Capitalists with their hands on their hearts to claim that there is anything divine or fundamentally sacred about the right of private property, because it must be evident, without further enquiry, that if the definition of capitalism given above is even approximately just and fair, there must be an enormous deal in the present institution of private property which is both foul and indefensible. On the other hand, it is no good for Communists to reply to the claims of the Capitalists that they hold a panacea for all the world's ills. For, in this matter, as in others, the wise man, as Aristotle insists, will turn to experience. He will truthfully assert that he knows of no single instance of communal ownership having either created a great culture or people, or endured in a great culture or people. Even to the plea that Communism has never been tried and that to condemn it untried is philosophically unsound, the wise man, without referring to the monstrous fraud of Russian Communism, can reply that, on the contrary, it has been tried again and again, that it actually exists in a more or less modified form to-day, in a number of backward races, and that it is quite impossible entirely to separate their backwardness and their settled inferiority in the hierarchy of races, from the social principles by which they govern their lives. He can reply more or less as Aristotle did to Plato, that wherever he sees the principle of Communism applied, in Government offices and works, and in public services, in every country, no matter how highly civilized, he sees waste, inefficiency, daily and hourly robbery of the national exchequer, persistent extravagance of the most
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illusive and most undiscoverable kind, gross overlapping of duties, unnecessary multiplication of staffs, and above all chronic dereliction of duty in all ranks and departments. But this absurd controversy between these two forms of nonsense, Capitalism and Communism, has already led to terrible bloodshed — it is unfortunately chiefly over nonsense that blood is shed — and is likely to do so again, and all to no purpose. Because, whichever side wins, the result is bound to be the re-enthronement of some tragic piece of buffoonery.
6. What then should be the attitude of the modern thinking man towards this ridiculous controversy? It is no longer either good policy or good humanity to rely on the trial and error method or on blind chance or emotion for the solution of this problem. We cannot afford at this stage in our evolution to be unconscious to the extent of becoming again the sport of circumstances. All too clearly we have seen the consequences of past generations having allowed themselves unconsciously to drift from one institution to another, and, in the case of Feudalism, from one good institution into a bad institution, to rely any longer on this process of blind and automatic adjustment. If we feel in the least entitled to regard ourselves as adults in the historical sense, it is surely time that we became perfectly conscious and directed our footsteps on a conscious plane. For reasons that have been explained, the philosophers do not help us much. Too anxious to establish the axiomatic nature of the right of private property, they have given us no guidance, no criterion by which we can determine its sanctity, if such it ever can have. They have not helped us to distinguish between private property that is sacred and private property that is profane. And yet upon this
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distinction the conscious modification of our institutions must turn. First of all, following Aristotle, let us see what there is to be said for private ownership. Past experience and the common verdict of mankind points to private ownership as a desirable institution for the following reasons: (a) It is the first pre-requisite of individual freedom, both in the detailed and wider sense. (You cannot be free if you have to share one pair of boots with another man, as Lenin and Trotsky once had to do during their exile in Paris. You cannot be free if the overseer of a Communistic State determines your occupation for you. You cannot be free if you do not possess the instruments, or tools of the craft you wish to practise. In the wider sense, you cannot be free, i.e. at liberty to exchange a bondage incompatible with your highest impulses, for a bondage that harmonizes with them 1 — unless you can choose your road, your path. And Communism could not fairly allow you to do this.) (b) It is the first pre-requisite for the exercise and development of taste. (Taste is discrimination in choice, and you cannot choose unless you can command circumstances. This you cannot do without a modicum of independence secured by private property.) (c) It is the first pre-requisite in the formation of character and the practice of self-discipline. (Some liberty of action, some power of arranging one's own life, and some certainty that one will enjoy the consequences of one's arrangement, are essential to the moulding of character, and this liberty and power presuppose some lasting control of material circumstances. In the same manner, some experience of the regrettable results of a wrong arrangement, some
