M'Glynn plainly sees and courageously says. What he proposes is that
the State shall compel the annual rental value of all land to be paid
into the public treasury, without regard to the question whether the
State does or does not need such a sum of money. That is confiscation
pure and simple, the State, in the assumed interest of the State,
proceeding against the private owners of land, or the "miscalled
owners," to use Dr. M'Glynn's significant phrase, precisely as under the
feudal system the State proceeded against the private property of rebels
and traitors. No good reason can be shown why the process should not be
applied to personalty and to debts as well as to land.

This was the doctrine indorsed at the polls in New York in November 1886
by 68,000 voters. Nor can there be much doubt that it would have been
indorsed by the few thousand more votes needed to defeat Mr. Hewitt, the
actual Mayor of New York, and to put Mr. Henry George into the Chief
Magistracy of the first city of the New World, had not its teachers and
preachers been confronted by the quiet, cool, and determined prelate who
met it as plainly as it was put. "Your letter," said the Archbishop,
"has brought the painful intelligence that you decline to go to Rome,
and that you have taught, and will continue to teach, the injustice of
private ownership of land, no matter by what laws of Church or State it
may be sanctioned. In view of such declarations, to permit you to
exercise the holy ministry would be manifestly wrong."

In these few words of the Archbishop of New York, we have plainly
affirmed in 1886 the principle underlying the Papal Decree of 1888
against the Plan of Campaign and Boycotting in Ireland. There is no
question of parties or of politics in the one case or in the other. When
Dr. M'Glynn talked about the private ownership of land in New York as
"against natural justice," he flung himself not only against the Eighth
Commandment and the teachings of the Catholic Church, touching the
rights of property, but against the constitutions of the State of New
York and of the United States. That "private property shall not be taken
for public uses without just compensation" is a fundamental provision of
the Constitution of the United States, which is itself a part of the
Constitution of every State of the Union; and the right of private
ownership in land is defined and protected beyond doubt or cavil in New
York under the State Constitution. An