What the Catholic Church once did for England, under military feudalism, she can do again, and more, because the present financial and industrial feudalism is pacific in its tendencies and susceptible of being harmonized with the interests of the church and of labor by co-operative association; whereas the former feudalism existed for war, was essentially opposed to the spirit of Christianity, to the honor of productive industry, and the prosperity of the people. Now, what is cure for Great Britain may be prevention for America, which undergoes, like England, the yoke of industrial feudalism. Allowing for the category of accidents, for relief needed by the infirm, etc., vastly the larger proportion of pauperism remains to be prevented by opportune employments, of which the soil serves as the basis. Let the religious orders reacquire everywhere, by all legitimate means, the control of large bodies of land, which they shall withhold from speculation, which they shall either administrate by leases or by direct culture, and on which they shall establish the arts of fabrication. Then they may subdue the world with its own weapons, commanding capital and labor, conciliating them in Christian action, and producing wealth without sacrificing the producer to the product. They would lease farms or hire workmen according to local and temporary expediency, but in either case they would constitute, as of old, a bulwark between the people and speculators, and they would reattach the masses by intimate household ties. This begins as of old with the voluntary assumption of social burdens, especially with the care of the sick and infirm. By organizing a high order of attractive social life at its rural institutions, where it is so much easier to find healthful work for either sex and every age, the church will counteract that destructive fascination which the city now exerts over the country-folk. In restoring and upholding an order of yeomanry, subject to its general administration of agriculture, but free in a scope of action sufficient to content them, within a predetermined plan, the Catholic Church would counterpoise the present league of the Church of England with its aristocracy, as its corporate philanthropies would counterpoise the corporate selfishness of simple business firms.
Pursuing the noble initiative which the Jesuit order took in the work of education, especially in Paraguay, it remains for the church to second the views of American legislation in the foundation of art and labor-schools, or agricultural and polytechnic institutes, for the support of which public lands were appropriated in 1842, although Minnesota alone has had the wisdom to protest against the malversation of this fund to the comparatively sterile work of our common schools.
It is not by any means an unreasonable assumption that, after a few years of experience and discipline for the teachers, art and labor-schools, embracing all the departments of rural and domestic economy with religious and social training, may be made self-supporting. From that day their popularity will be assured, and pauperism will be well-nigh eradicated, together with the vices and crimes which it engenders. The diploma of such an institution might confer either a lease of land or an appointment to some office of social use and profit. The administration of the schools and charities of the church would supply a great many such places.
We shall not ask whether it be not expedient and just to oblige every family, in so far as it may be competent, to provide for its own poor, because modern civilization has not the patriarchal basis, the family has no such collective unity or substantial existence among us, as formerly in Palestine, or still in the Arab douar. At most can the family be held responsible for its minors, since its authority does not extend beyond this class; but we remark that the largest proportion of pauperism is due to the neglect of efficient education during the years of minority; so that with the actual population of the world, and even in the most thickly settled countries, there need be no such thing as pauperism, if the productive energies of the whole people received during childhood and youth a practical direction; while the diplomas of our labor and art-schools conferred valid titles to the use of the soil or other means of remunerative employment. If to organize such education for the children of poor families be regarded as beyond the province of our governments or secular powers, how much more extravagant must this seem for the children of the rich, who are, however, exposed every day to become poor, and whose wasteful idleness subtracts so much from the possible resources of mankind? Is it not self-evident that the influence of religious organizations has every advantage over secular authority in reforming education while rendering it universal? At once personal and corporate, they can take an initiative which is refused to governments or which governments decline. Now, as in the middle ages, in civilized as in savage or barbarous states, they can restore to labor its religious honor, they alone can successfully combat the idleness and vices of fashionable dissipation, they can substitute the arbitrament of Christian equity for that of fire and sword, and while pouring oil on our troubled waters, they can teach by example as well as by precept, those wholesome restraints which prevent the increase of a local population faster than the means of its subsistence.
If pauperism in this country is chiefly exotic, it is none the less real, and none the less afflictive or disastrous. If an obvious remedy exist in our vast tracts of unoccupied land, it is so much the more urgent to organize while directing the tide of emigration by the spirit of Christianity. By colonizing emigrants under the guidance of religious orders we obviate the twofold evils of their pauperism and their isolation.
The Iliad Of Homer.
Rendered Into English Blank Verse
By Edward, Earl Of Derby.