The Church and the Toiler.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXX, Issue 12, 20 March 1902, Page 18

The Church and the Toiler.

The Rev. Father John, C.P., is now delivering a series of Lenten discourses in Adelaide, and in many of them has set forth with admirable lucidity and distinctness the attitude which the Churchmaintains, and has always maintained, with respect to social quest tions, and especially that one, dealing with Labor. The rights o Labor are well summed up in the second clause of the preamble to the Constitution of the American Knights of Labor ' The workers of every land should have the full enjoyment of the wealth they create, sufficient leisure in which to develop their intellectual, moral, and social faculties ; all of the benefit?, recreations, and pleasures of association ; in a word —everything to enable them to share the gains and honors of advancing civilisation.' Our Holy Father, Leo XIII., in the 'Conditions of Labor,' says : 'Man is older than the State, and holds the right of providing for the life of the body prior to the formation of the State.' This implies the pos session of property, and hence the Socialism which denies the right of private possession is wrong. But the individualism that affirms the absoluteness of tbe right of private possession is also wrong, because the possession is subject to a condition, St. Thomas of Aquinas teaches that 'it is lawful for a man to hold privat c property, and it is also necessary for the carrying on ot human life, but that he should consider his outward possessions not his own, but ac common to all, so as to share them without difficulty when others need.' The Socialism which would destroy the right of possession to, say, a home, stands condemned in contradistinction to the Socialism which strives not only for the right of the toiler to live, but also for his right to independence as a man and a Christian. Justice dictates that every man has a claim to the fruit of his toil. The produce of Jabor is the natural recompense of labor ; the property which every man has in his own labor, as it is the original foundation of all other property, is sacred. * The Church ever teaches that the laborer is worthy of his hire. He does not always receive it. 'If a man will not work, neither let him eat,' quotes the Rev. Father ; ' but if a man work and be cheated of his wages, as the moilers of the modern Moloch of Labordom are, then up to the ever-listening ears of the Eternal Bhudders a wail for the vengeance that sooner or later will fall with a thunder-crash of withering woe.' The moiler is not only entitled in strict justice to the fruit of the sweat of his brow, he is entitled to a wage sufficient to keep him from the stress of want, Leo XIII. in his Encyclical says : ' If through necessity the workman accepts harder conditions because an employer will give him no better, he is the victim of force and injustice.' And again : ' Therefore no man can contract to work so many hours and so many days a week as to render it impossible for him to live a Christian and a human life,' and wherever the general interest of any particular class suffers, or is threatened with evils that can in no way be met, the public authority must Etep in and meet them. The Church consistently puts these doctrines into effect. Cardinal Manning's name in England, MermiJlod's in Switzerland, Bishop Von Renter's in Germany, those of the Abbes Pottier and Mellaerta in Belgium, Abbe Lichaux's in France, all testify to the unwearying interest of the Church in the welfare of the toiler. In Belgium the Democratic League includes over 300 societies on the study of economic and social problems, and possesses a membership of many more than 100,000. In France there are countless clubs, each presided over by a priest, and all for the regulation of the laborers' lot. An Archbishop of Madrid

advocated the Labor cause, and soon had an organisation of over 30 clulw of agricultural laborers with 12,000 members. In Germany Father Kolping, once a shoemaker, organised journeymen's club.^ and soon enrolled 80,000 members. The worker and the employed have duties one to another, and it is only when these duties are discharged according to the spirit of Christianity that conflict between labor and capital ceases.