Winding up days with toil and nights with sleep.
Shakespeare.

There are deep-lying causes of anxiety, unrest, and sleeplessness that more or less affect us all: yet, eighteen hundred years ago, One cried, “The Kingdom of God is at hand.” Not, to come eventually, or to future peoples, but “the Kingdom is at hand.” We have looked over a world filled with injustice, for the coming of the kingdom—but we have not seen it. What is it that hides “the Kingdom at hand” from our eyes? Is it not iniquity? What kind of iniquity? We once had chattel slavery, which was denounced as “the sum of all villainies.” We still have monopoly of the gift of God, which is the fundamental iniquity. For every one of his children a loving father made ample provision in the earth, but we have allowed a few to monopolize it all; some nine out of every hundred own our earth, and we find that, under such circumstances, the laws of God are impracticable; therefore, we say “the Kingdom is not a real Kingdom—it is only in men’s minds, only in some far-off imaginable day it may be in their hearts.”

The kingdom of God is in our hearts, and, if to-day we will but allow all our fellows to share in the bounty of Nature, the kingdom will be around us also, here and now.

For there is a divine order, a natural law, obedience to which brings its own immediate rewards; disobedience to which involves its own punishment. The first order of Nature is that men should derive their subsistence from the land and the products of land, provided by an all-wise Creator. From what else can we derive it? Does not everything we need, from the wheat to the wheel of the watch, come from the earth? By many hands, by many processes, through many stages, all forms of wealth are obtained by labor from the land. Food, clothing, fuel, machinery, buildings, capital are all results of men working on the materials of the earth. So it is clear why, when we have allowed men to be shut out from that earth, we find ourselves surrounded by poverty and misery.

Like all fundamental laws, the law of our economic relations is simple and easily understood, even by children. It may be stated thus: food, clothes, and shelter, being essential to the maintenance of human life, all human creatures have equal need of and, therefore, equal right to access to the source of food, clothes, and shelter. This source is the earth, and the only method known whereby the earth may be made to yield food, clothes, and shelter is by the application of labor to land. For, no matter what picture we conjure up, whether it be of the farmer tilling the soil, the carpenter building a house, the factory operative weaving cloth, the engineer driving the locomotive that draws the produce to markets—there we find labor. And, if we try to imagine any of these forms of labor as cut off from land, we shall find our very concept of labor and of life wiped out.

Everything necessary to life, whether it be the life of the individual, the nation, or of the whole race, can be produced by the combination of land and labor. Anything that restricts or hampers the application of labor to land leads to suffering on the part of those deprived of this access. When the government of a new country wants to increase population, it offers free land to settlers. It does not say, “If you will come to this country, the government will build mills, factories, stores, offices, banks, and churches for you”; it says rather, “Here is land, come and use it; build for yourselves out of its materials.” All other forms of prosperity flow from the application of labor to land, and, therefore, it is sufficient to give to men free access to natural opportunities. If the government of a country owned all the land of that country, it could increase, restrict, or otherwise regulate population, and better or worsen the condition of that population by the way in which it granted or withheld the land under its control.

This is in effect what government has done. It first bettered conditions by allowing free access to land, and then worsened them by allowing a few to make the land their private property; this appropriation of the land carries with it the power to hold it out of use, thus depriving all men of their equal right to the use of the earth, the source of supply for all men’s wants. Instead of these favored few being made to pay those deprived of the land an equivalent for the privilege enjoyed, the disinherited many are compelled to pay a premium to the landholder for the opportunity to labor.

When there is a lockout, is it not the pressure of want that brings the men back, hat in hand, to the factory door? If one could go to the outskirts of this town to cultivate a bit of the unused land, could he not hold out till he got all that his labor was worth? And, when he and his fellows are offered less, if they could but get at the unused mines and quarries and coalfields and factory sites, and vacant lots, they would not need to seek an employer at all—they could get credit, if needed, and produce for themselves the capital which they now produce for others and employ themselves in doing it.

So many evils flow from the fundamental wrong of shutting up the earth, that rest, the peace of mind and body that makes for refreshing sleep, is to many impossible.

And who that understands would wish it otherwise? Were the power of rest and peace universal now, it would be a denial of the very cause of rest,—the proper understanding of man’s relations to humanity and to life. Until man has adjusted his economic contrivances to the underlying laws of a true Social Science, he cannot have national or racial rest. The material science, biology, is proving this ethical truth. Recently Dr. Woods Hutchinson has shown that it does not take even three generations to make a high-class man a “thoroughbred,” as he terms it. If good food, light, air, proper clothing, and wholesome recreation were extended to the masses, each generation would produce its own “thoroughbreds” from the “common people.” He says: “Men not only can but do get to be as able, as useful, and as desirable citizens for the community, in every possible regard, in one generation as they will ever get or are capable of becoming. Give the unspoiled, warm-hearted mass of humanity a fair living chance—good food, fresh air, sunshine, decent homes, no overwork, plenty of healthful amusements—and you will reap a far larger crop not merely of happiness, of justice, and of well-being, but also of geniuses, of great men and of all leaders and illuminators than any nation can possibly utilize.”

Until the privilege-created aristocracy of other countries and plutocracy of this country get off the backs of the people and cease to exploit them by monopolies, there can be no complete and permanent rest, for the “mania for owning things” possesses the rich, and the fear of want makes restlessness for the poor. The burden-bearing masses have not yet seen the cause of their burden, even though they feel its intolerable weight at times and make efforts to throw it off. All this deepens their unrest.

The very oneness of all life will put sound sleep and true rest ever beyond the general reach until all are given equal opportunity in Nature’s great gift to man, the Earth.

Then the worker, free of the taxes of rent and monopoly, free of cut-throat competition forced by monopoly, would have some leisure in which to use his brains and cultivate his affections; and liberty—moral, intellectual, and economic—would be here.

Was it not something like this which Jesus had in mind when he said “the Kingdom of God is at hand”? Did not he say that obedience to the laws of the Universe would bring their own immediate and immense reward? The kingdom and the peace of God is within our reach, did we but realize it.