usand years of advance, 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 invention; 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 development; and you will find it something which
this Hebrew statesman three thousand 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 enslavement, 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 private
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 give