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Hellraisers Journal -Thursday March 26, 1903
J. A. Wayland on Right of Human Beings to Earth, Air and Water
From the Appeal to Reason of March 21, 1903:
SERFS, WAKE UP!
———-Every human being has the NATURAL RIGHT to work, to use as much of the earth, air and water as necessary to produce, and to pay no man for the use of them. No being has any right to profit off any other human being. Such profit is slavery. Slavery consists solely in one being used for the pleasure or profit of another.
Chattel slavery was one set of beings working for the pleasure and profit of the master, receiving only their necessary food and shelter out of their toil. Wage slavery does the same thing. The wage-workers are employed for the pleasure or profit of the master class, receiving in wages only enough to feed and shelter them, the surplus above this going to the masters.
Serfdom was a condition in which the serfs worked for the feudal lord two or three days in each week, and the balance of the time they had all the land they could use, and paid no other kind of profit or taxes. Land tenantry today takes from the workers one-third or one-half the crop just the same as serfdom, but puts an additional burden on them of taxes, and a profit is taken out of what remains on everything they buy.
The present land system in this country today is worse to that extent than was the serfdom of the Middle Ages. As the serfs then raised up under that system were unable to see the robbery they suffered, and were mostly satisfied, so you, tenants of today, raised up under the private ownership of the soil, pay your rent, or serfage, and do not see the wrong under which you live. Because you have always seen land bought and sold, and rent paid for it, you have never thought that there was anything wrong with such a system that takes from you half of your products, and gives it over to those who have cunningly got hold of the land.
Private ownership of land is a crime, and the landless, who are in a majority, should use their ballots to elect men to office who will change it, that every child, when it grows up, will have the use of land, without paying other human beings for what God made a free gift to man. If each has all the land he or she can use, what would they want with more, except to deny others the right to use the earth, that they may levy tribute on them? Wake up.
[Emphasis and paragraph breaks added.]
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