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Excerpt from book:
III. PROPERTY IN LAND. , The possession of property is the one object of desire most nearly universal in civilized communities. There is no stronger passion; it exists in different degrees of development in different individuals and in different communities, but there are few who will not confess some personal experience of its cravings. "It is not," says one, "merely the love of self and wife and child that intensifies the desire for property, but the love of power in all its forms; the love of liberty and independence ; and very particularly fear, — the fear of the uncertain morrow, with all its danger for the prop- ertiless. All these and other passions and desires combine to strengthen the passion for property to an intense extreme, and even boundless degree. . . . Our moralist Carlyle vents scornful sarcasm on the English people ' whose hell is want of money or failure to make money.' I venture to affirm, on the contrary, that the hell in question, if only the poverty or lack of money is sufficiently absolute, will be, for most people, a very serious and most real hell."1 1 The Social Problem, by William Graham, pp. 333, 335. Since this passion is so nearly universal and so intense, it is evident that in our work as Christian witnesses we shall constantly encounter it; that it will mightily affect for good or ill the characters of the men to whom we are sent with the gospel; that no small part of our care will be the direction or the repression of this omnipresent force. It is of theutmost consequence, then, that we understand it. The institution of property, its origin in human nature, its relation to human history, its place and function in human society, is a theme that demands our patient study. What is the Christian law of property? On what basis do property...