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THE CATHOLIC CONGRESS. 71
LABOR AND CAPITAL.
ELEVENTH REGULAR PAPER, BY WILLIAM RICHARDS, OF WASHING-
TON, D.C.
Ir may well be said that all the burning questions of the day,
pertaining to labor and capital, the production and distribution of
wealth, and the condition of the working classes, virtually consti-
tute one great social problem. Our Holy Father, the Pope, recently
declared that charity alone can solve this problem. ‘This is the
theme of my discourse.
I do not discuss the details of labor organizations, the adjustment
of capital and labor, the distribution of the proceeds of production,
or the like; but I offer some historical illustrations in order to con-
trast the social condition of ‘‘former ages when,’’ asthe Holy Father
said,* ‘‘ the mission of charity was acknowledged and accepted by
all,’’ with the social condition of later ages in which ‘‘ free competi-
tion’’ has been substituted for charity. The first illustration which
I offer is drawn from the introduction to Motley’s history of ‘‘ The
Rise of the Dutch Republic,’’ in which, after rapidly sketching the
origin of the people of Batavia, their gradual advancement from the
beginning of the Christian era, their wonderful domination_of sea
and land, and their extraordinary progress until about the time of
the Reformation (so-called), the author sums up the results of their
development in these graphic words:
“Thus } fifteen ages have passed away, and in the place of a
horde of savages, living among swamps and thickets, swarm
3,000,000 people, the most industrious, the most prosperous,
perhaps the most intelligent under thesun. * * * Their national
industry was untiring; their prosperity unexampled; their love of
liberty indomitable; their pugnacity proverbial. * * Their
women were distinguished by beauty of form and vigor of consti-
tution. Accustomed from childhood to converse freely with all
classes in the daily walks of life, and to travel on foot or horseback
from one town to another, without escort and without fear, they
had acquired manners more frank and independent than those of
women in: other lands, while their morals were pure and their
decorum undoubted.. * * * Within theilittle circle which encloses
the seventeen provinces were 208 walled cities, many of them the
most stately:in Christendom, 150 chartered towns, 6,300 villages,
with their watch towers and steeples, besides numerous other more
insignificant hamlets; the whole guarded by a belt of sixty fortresses
of surpassing strength.”’
While the historian omitted to emphasize the fact that from
about the year 750 the Catholic religion had been the all-prevailing
religion of this people, yet he did not fail to declare that ‘‘ the stand-
ard of culture’’ in the flourishing cities of Ghent, Bruges, Antwerp,
etc., ‘‘ was elevated, compared with that observed in many parts of
Europe. The children of the wealthier classes enjoyed great facili-
ties for education in all the great capitals. The classics, music, and
the modern languages, particularly the French, were universally
cultivated. Nor was intellectual cultivation confined to the higher
orders. On the contrary, it was diffused to a remarkable degree
among the hard-working artisans and handicraftsmen of the great
cities.”
The author then alludes to ‘the numerous guilds by which
citizenship was acquired in the various cities’; to the ‘‘many other
societies for mutual improvement, support, or recreation’’; to the
‘great architectural brotherhood of Germany, to which the magnifi-
cent works of Gothic architecture in the middle ages are mainly
attributable’; and especially the ‘‘many splendid and elaborately
finished churches in the provinces’; to the ‘‘ military sodalities”’
whose ‘‘ yearly festivals were always held with great solemnity and
rejoicing’; and lastly to the ‘‘ Guilds of Rhetoric which existed in
all the principal cities,’’ and indeed ‘‘in the most obscure villages,”
and were ‘‘associations of mechanics, weavers, smiths, gardeners,
and traders, for the purpose of amusing their leisure with poetical
effusions, dramatic and musical exhibitions, theatrical processions,
and other harmless and not inelegant recreations.’’ These guilds
of rhetoric ‘‘came originally in the fifteenth century from France,”’
‘‘spread with great celerity throughout the Netherlands,’’ ‘ were
of great value in drawing the people of the provinces into closer
union.’’ and ‘‘ became important political engines’’ which ‘‘the
sovereigns were always anxious to conciliate by becoming members
of them in person.’’ Periodic jubilees were celebrated in various
*Address to the French workingmen Sunday, October 20, 1889.
| Vol. I, page 90, edition of 1858
capital cities, when ‘‘all the guilds of rhetoric in the Netherlands
were invited to partake and to compete in magnificent processions,
brilliant costumes, living picturés, charades, and other animated
glittering groups, and-in trials of dramatic and poetic skilf, all
arranged under the superintendence of the particular association
. which, in the preceding year, had borne away the prize.”
In these brilliant pen pictures, Mr. Motley omits to mention
that every one of those festivals and jubilees was commenced by a
devout and magnificent celebration of solemn high Mass. He does
condescend, however, to testify that, ‘‘ These literary guilds befitted
and denoted a people which was alive, a people which had neither
sunk to sleep in the lap of material prosperity, nor abased itself in
the sty of ignorance and political servitude. The spirit of liberty
pervaded these rude but not illiterate assemblies.”
Rude, forsooth! A people so upright, orderly, and chivalric
that a woman could travel from one town to another, all through
the seventeen provinces, without escort and without fear, a rude
people! But we will not quarrel with the historian’s standard of
rudeness while he says: ‘‘The spirit of liberty pervaded these
rude but not illiterate assemblies, and her fair proportions were
distinctly visible even through the somewhat grotesque garb which
she assumed.”’
If the ‘‘spirit of liberty ’’ in those ‘‘rude”’ times had only been
smart enough to put on the beautiful ‘‘ garb’? which she assumes at
our modern ‘‘fests’’ and picnics where the participants guzzle lager
beer, chase the greased pig, and wind up with the enticing and
voluptuous round dance, how much more admirable she would have
been in the eyes oftthe modern ‘‘ advanced thinker’’ !
Specially worthy of quotation by way of contrast with the per-
sistent but erroneous assertions of those enemies of the Catholic
Church who declare that she had no schools in the middle ages and
kept her people in ignorance, is that striking paragraph which stands
out like a radiant jewel in the midst of the author’s splendid descrip-
tion of ‘‘the chief city of the Netherlands, the commercial capital of
the world—Antwerp’’: ‘‘The condition of her population was
prosperous. ‘There were but few poor, and those did not seek, but
were sought by the almoners. The schools were excellent and
cheap. It was difficult to find a child of sufficient age who could
not read, write, and speak at least two languages.”
- Truly these are pleasing pictures, and we naturally inquire:
Why could not the historian have carefully studied a social, relig-
ious, and political system which prevailed so long before the Refor-
mation, and produced such splendid results, with a view to discover-
ing its vitalizing principles, and explaining them for the illumination
of ‘‘seekers after truth’? in times all out of joint, like ours? But
of course it would never occur to one like Motley, enveloped as he
was in the blazing noon-day light of the nineteenth century, that
the system whose fruits he described in such glowing colors owed
anything to the Catholic religion, or to the teachings of the Catholic
Church; nor would he have admitted that the appalling calamities
which befell Europe immediately after the Reformation, and which
he describes in such lurid colors, were due entirely to the departure
of the world from the principles and teachings of the Catholic
Church.
Mr. Motley imagined that he was wiser than the church, and so,
instead of endeavoring to analyze and elucidate that wonderful
system, he deplored the low ideas of human rights tvhich then pre-
vailed; for, after alluding to the ‘‘liberties’’ conferred upon guilds
by virtue of which they had the right of representation in town and
other governments, he said: ‘‘In later days loftier ideas of human
rights, larger conceptions of commerce have taught mankind the
difference between liberties and liberty, between guilds and free
competition.”’
Liberty and free competifion! This was the watchword of the
new order of things. Had Motley but listened to his master, Car-
lyle, whose peculiar style he was such a bungler in imitating, he
would have learned that this boasted liberty, after 300 years of the
blessings of the Reformation, had ‘‘turned out to be for the working
millions a liberty to die by want of food; for idle thousands and
units, alas! a still more fatal liberty to live in want of work, to have
no earnest duty to do in this, God’s world, any more.”’
And then as to ‘‘free competition.’? Motley could have read
these burning words of Carlyle in ‘‘Past and Present’’: ‘*We
coldly see the all-conquering, valiant sons of toil sit enchanted, by
the million, in the poor-law Bastile, as if this were nature’s law;
mumbling to ourselves some vague janglement of /aissez faire, sup-
ply and demand, cash payment, the one nexus of man to man:
‘Free trade, competition, and devil take the hindmost,’ our latest
gospel yet preached.”
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