For example, there can be no doubt that there is justification for the Socialist declaration regarding the unequal distribution of wealth. The facts in the case are too notorious to permit of denial, when multitudes are suffering all the woes of destitution, when many are starving for lack of life’s bare necessities, and while the few are able to waste in extravagance the means which would relieve the sufferings of countless thousands if properly applied. “The pestilential principle that each man has the right to dispose of his wealth without regard to the common good is the cause of the widespread mischief,” says Welsh. This unjust principle is also responsible for the inadequate rate of wage and the horrible conditions which exist so generally among the miserable multitude. There are those who may deny that such conditions prevail; but our own eyes and ears, to say nothing of the great mass of statistical information which is within our reach, prove conclusively that there are untold thousands of children who are born into the world without a chance of life or happiness; that vast multitudes of young women, unable to sustain life in the unequal struggle for existence, are driven to the streets for the sustenance which they find it impossible to earn by honest toil; that men and women, who are entitled in strict justice to a wage that will support them and those dependent on them, are deprived of all their natural rights through no fault of their own. For them there is no such thing as decent food, clothing and shelter possible, to say nothing of the hope of ever being able to meet the higher but no less natural requirements of life. Christianity has always held that it is the duty of each and all to preserve life decently and that anything that tends to make this impossible is a crime. “This idea of class duties and class comforts is either explicitly or implicitly referred to as the final test in every question of distribution or exchange,” says Ashley, who quoted Langenstein in evidence of the fact that these principles of industrial justice were recognized prior to the fourteenth century. “Everyone,” says the latter, “can determine for himself the just price of the wares he has to sell by simply reckoning what he needs in order to support himself in his rank of life”; and those who have read the writings of the Church Fathers do not need to be told that Christianity has ever maintained the necessity of recognizing the right of the worker to a living wage. These traditional teachings are embodied in the Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII, who repudiates the principle that competition alone determines the morality of the so-called free contract.