Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 3.djvu/27

MOSES 7 vance, and still the moan goes up, " They have made our lives bitter with hard bondage, in mortar and in brick, and in all manner of service ! " Three thousand years of advance ! Yet the piteous voices of little children are in the moan. We progress and we progress ; we girdle continents with iron roads and knit cities together with the mesh of telegraph wires ; each day brings some new in- vention ; each year marks a fresh advance the power of production increased, and the avenues of exchange cleared and broadened. Yet the complaint of " hard times " is louder and louder : everywhere are men harassed by care, and haunted by the fear of want. With swift, steady strides and prodigious leaps, the power of human hands to satisfy human wants advances and advances, is multiplied and multiplied. Yet the struggle for mere existence is more and more intense, and labor is cheapest of commodities. Beside glutted warehouses human beings grow faint with hunger and shiver with cold ; under the shadow of churches festers the vice that is born of want. Trace to their root the causes that are thus producing want in the midst of plenty, ignorance in the midst of intelligence, aristocracy in democracy, weakness in strength that are giving to our civilization a one-sided and unstable develop- ment ; and you will find it something which this Hebrew statesman three thou- sand years ago perceived and guarded against. Moses saw that the real cause of the enslavement of the masses of Egypt was, what has everywhere produced en- slavement, the possession by a class of the land upon which and from which the whole people must live. He saw that to permit in land the same unqualified pri- vate ownership that by natural right attaches to the things produced by labor, would be inevitably to separate the people into the very rich and the very poor, inevitably to enslave labor to make the few the masters of the many, no matter what the political forms, to bring vice and degradation no matter what the religion. And with the foresight of the philosophic statesman he sought, in ways suited to his times and conditions, to guard against this error. Everywhere in the Mosaic institutions is the land treated as the gift of the Creator to His common creatures, which no one has the right to monopolize. Everywhere it is, not your estate, or your property ; not the land which you bought, or the land which you conquered, but " the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee"" the land which the Lord lendeth thee." And by practical legislation, by regulations to which he gave the highest sanctions, he tried to guard against the wrong that converted ancient civilizations into despotisms the wro.-ig that in after centuries ate out the heart of Rome, and produced the im- bruting serfdom of Poland and the gaunt misery of Ireland, the wrong that is to- day crowding families into single rooms and filling our new States with tramps. He not only provided for the fair division of the land among the people, and for making it fallow and common every seventh year, but by the institution of the jubilee he provided for a redistribution of the land every fifty years and made monopoly impossible. I do not say that these institutions were, for their ultimate purpose, the best that might even then have been devised, for Moses had to work, as all great con-