Christianity is ideally practical in upholding every man's right to self-control in the interest of all. It distinguishes equity from equality in distribution of all good, wealth included. Public property is rightly public when the wants and energies of all the community are best provided for by such common ownership. Proof in each particular case is essential against the presumption that individual needs are the best impulses to provision for welfare. Even common property is limited necessarily to the numbers who can use it. No property or wealth can exist for anybody without the control of some human individuals for whom it is accumulated.
Wants individual.—We are likely to lose sight of the essential individuality of wants and exertions which make wealth possible, because in any community exchange of services modifies the direct relation of each man's wants to his accumulations. Assuming that others, wanting food, will exchange clothing for it, one man stores food alone, but in quantities far beyond his own need, measuring its relation to all his material wants through the wants and exertions of others. He feels even more sure of the continued activity of wants and powers among a multitude than if he had but one neighbor; but individuals, after all, must need his products and exert themselves to meet the need, or all his calculations fail.
Progress in welfare.—Economic progress must show a larger welfare to individuals of the community. The familiar figure by which a commonwealth is compared to an animal organism fails to include the important fact that the individuals of the commonwealth furnish the only reason for the existence of the commonwealth itself, as well as its only means of existence. The cells of the animal, or even the most important organs, have no reason for existence in themselves. Each individual man furnishes the reasons for his activity, and the needs of individual men furnish the only reason for having a commonwealth.
We can speak of progress, then, only when these individuals secure a better use of wealth in some way. It may be by accumulation through saving from the full years for the empty, as older communities can endure a drought with little suffering, while pioneers are ruined. It may be by an increased product for a given exertion, as illustrated by every labor-saving implement upon the farm or in the factory. It may be by lessening exertion for a given product, as in the devices of kitchen and dairy to make tasks lighter. It may be in better distribution of the total product through readier and fairer exchanges of services or products, as happens with every improvement in transportation and every means for fairer understanding in a bargain. Lastly, it may be in more economical expenditure for common wants, as in maintaining government machinery. Usually, progress has been marked along several of these lines at once, if not all of them. There is reason in the statement of Charles Francis Adams that the last [pg 018] century far exceeds the gain of a thousand years before.
Production, distribution, consumption.—Full consideration of rural wealth as related to welfare must first give the principles upon which wealth is produced, including exchange with all its machinery; for the marketing of produce is today one of the chief steps in securing wealth by farming. The thrifty farmer of today is the man of most business tact and energy, who uses most approved means of raising, handling and marketing his goods.
It also requires a careful study of principles upon which any product of exertions, where more than one person has contributed toward the whole, can be fairly shared between the producers, however they have helped. A farmer is as thoroughly interested in problems of rent, interest and profits, if not in wages, as any other worker for wealth or welfare.
It further involves the study of economic uses for wealth, private and public, since no wealth has found the true reason for its existence till the uses to which it is put are known. This includes all questions upon the economic functions of government, the ends to be served, and the raising and handling of revenues. If any patriots need to know for what, how and in what measure their country is dependent upon their own resources, it is the farmers, whose homes make the bulk of the land we love, whose children furnish the bone and sinew of industry, and whose interests are most sensitive to misdirected energy in public administration.
Security in stable government.—Agriculture, of all [pg 019] industries, can flourish in that country alone where personal and property rights are fully understood and respected, where claims are equitably adjusted by a stable government, and where taxes are properly apportioned and revenues economically expended.