The land we share is our mother; she feeds us; she gives us shelter; she makes us happy and lovingly warms us; from the moment of our birth until we take our final rest in eternal sleep on her maternal breast, she is constantly cherishing us with her tender embraces. And now, despite this, people are talking about selling her, and truly, in our corrupt, venal age land is put on the market for appraisal and so-called sale. But selling land created by the Heavenly Creator is a barbaric absurdity. The principal error here lies in the crude and monstrous assertion that the land, which God gave to all people so that they could feed themselves, could be anyone's private property. This is just as much an act of violence as slavery. Land is the common and equal legacy of all people and so cannot be the object of private ownership by individual persons. All people from the very outset and before any legal act own the land—that is, they have the right to be allotted land where nature and accident have put them. The bodies of men and women, and even more so their souls, should not be bought or sold, and the same goes for land, water, and air, because these things are the essential conditions for the support of people's bodies and souls. Ownership of land, as property, is one of the most unnatural of crimes. The repulsiveness of this crime goes unnoticed by us, the poor, only because in our immoral world this crime is deemed a right according to human laws. Remember and do not forget that you do not have any right whatsoever to the land, that you are a servant of that principle which gave you life, and so you have only obligations to fulfill the teaching of Christ. The land belongs to almighty God, as His creation, and to all the sons of man, as His heirs in equal part, just as we give it to our heirs in equal part for working on it, or to those who would work it with their own hands. It is the property not of any one generation but of all past, present, and future generations who work it and who will work it, each with their own hands, in order to feed themselves, and not according to the whim of the so-called private owners of the land. These people descend, for the sake of satisfying their own animal needs, to the level of cattle, while those people by whose labor an abundance of wealth is created struggle in poverty. Each person, upon being born into the world, does not bring any property with him into the world, and also no one being born is designated to own private land. Where did they ever come up with such barbaric rights to private ownership of the Lord's land? Current land rights cannot be said to be legal. Let anyone who thinks so look through the chronicles. Assault, deceit, power, cunning—here are the sources from which these rights stem. After all, there are people in the world who, having renounced all divine and natural laws, have created laws for themselves and obey them strictly, such as, for example, thieves and others. And now, on the basis of just such laws, immoral people have turned up who, not without great sin, are participating in the seizure, sale, purchase, reinforcement, and management of privately owned land. If a person acquires property he did not produce, he necessarily acquires it at the expense of those who did produce it. By acquiring private ownership of land in this way, you are forcing the majority of people to be and consider themselves unhappy. What kind of happiness can there be that is acquired to the detriment of others' happiness? Alexander of Macedonia and all the authorities of the past lived by a lie alone and based their happiness on the unhappiness of others. He [such a person] is conscious in himself of the impossibility of producing anything good and so assures himself that everything he produces is good. Don't dream that you might benefit from anything that goes together with betrayal, dishonesty, hatred, malice, arrogance, hypocrisy, or any kind of deed that requires a curtain or a closed door. And whatever you stop at is where you will remain. Simple justice does not allow private land ownership, because if one part of the earth's surface can fairly be the property of a single individual and can be held by him for his personal gain and use, as a thing over which he has an exclusive right, then other parts of the earth's surface can easily be made into the same kind of property, and the entire earth's surface might possibly be made into the same and so the globe would become private property, and then there would not be land for future generations to feed themselves. Look from the standpoint of an observer of nature at a landless person, at a being who has the opportunity and ability to exploit the land and is forced by necessity to exploit it but at the same time is illegally deprived of his right to land. This is as unnatural as a bird without air or a fish without water. The worst thief is not the one who takes what he needs but the one who keeps the most inalienable property—the land, which is essential if people are to be able to feed themselves—away from people. Private ownership of land never arose from natural relations among men but always appeared in history as a consequence of seizure and theft and is such an extreme absurdity, such a crude injustice, such a blatant squandering of productive forces and a barrier to the most profitable exploitation of natural wealth, so much the opposite of sensible public policy, and such a brake on any true improvement in the daily life of mankind that it is tolerated only because the government is gagging the majority of the poor people so that they can't express their own desires and needs. Did God ever give something to one without giving the same to the other? Would the Father of All exclude any of His children from participating in the land legacy? Are all the private landowners His natural sons and everyone else the stepchildren of some other father? You who demand the exclusive right to hold land in private ownership, show your brothers, who were born with the same rights as you, the testament according to which God bequeathed the land to you as private property but deprived your other brothers of their land inheritance. He did not give anyone such a law that allowed people the right to sell and buy His land. Moral men are ashamed of property as is used for idle whims and as a result of which millions of your brothers and sisters struggle in poverty and go hungry, and they, the landowners, should burn with shame as soon as the word “theft” is mentioned. Better to accrue wealth for yourself that thieves cannot steal, that tyrants would not dare encroach upon, that will remain with you even after your death, that will never be diminished and will never rot—this is a good and justice. A shipwrecked sailor has been cast onto our shore. Does he have the same natural right as we, on the same basis as we, to occupy a bit of the land in order to feed himself by his own labor? This right would seem to be beyond question. But meanwhile, how many people are born on our planet Earth whom the people living on it refuse this right to land? Since I was born on earth, to take from it what I need for feeding myself but not for luxury, then I have the right to demand my share for myself. Tell me, where is it? I will take pleasure in it as a loan given while I am alive—your share was stolen by selfish men for private ownership! Go work for them and they will give you a crust of bread, and if they hear the word “theft,” they'll put you in prison. While recognizing land as private property, people are worn out by work and hunger, deprived of all the joys and charms of life, doomed to ignorance and an impoverished existence and led to crimes and suicide, seemingly apart from anyone's will but by force of an apparently fateful necessity that is no one's fault. This war, which is a government-sanctioned crime, is taking away the sole worker in the family, one without land, and driving him out under the pretext of war to defend the rich and privately owned land, but they don't drive any private landowners to war—they say there's no law. They hang men, send men into hard labor, put them in prison, and kill them in war because there is a law, but for private landowners to perform compulsory military service there is no law? But laws don't surface from the water or grow up out of the earth or fall down from the sky, rather rhey are written in pen, on paper, by people. And in this way people are killed, according to the law, so that they won't demand land for feeding themselves. Like any injustice, the injustice of private land ownership is inevitably linked to the many injustices and evil deeds required for its protection. If the state is administered on the principles of reason, then one should be ashamed if there are people without land; if the state is not administered on the principles of reason, then one should be ashamed of land ownership because it did not arise out of the natural relations among men. I earnestly implore you to print this in the newspapers for people to know.