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PROPERTY

ITS DUTIES AND RIGHTS

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

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TORONTO

PROPERTY

ITS DUTIES AND RIGHTS

HISTORICALLY, PHILOSOPHICALLY
AND RELIGIOUSLY REGARDED

ESSAYS BY VARIOUS WRITERS

WITH AN INTRODUCTION
BY

THE BISHOP OF OXFORD

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON

19*3

COPYRIGHT

GIFT OF

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

By CHARLES GORE, D.D., D.C.L., LL.D., Bishop of

Oxford ........ vii

I. THE HISTORICAL EVOLUTION OF
PROPERTY, IN FACT AND IN IDEA

By L. T. HOBHOUSE, M.A., Professor of Sociology,

London University .... . . . i

II. THE PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY OF

PROPERTY

By the Rev. HASTINGS RASHDALL, D.LiTT., F.B.A.,

Fellow and Lecturer in Philosophy, New College,
Oxford ; Canon of Hereford . . . . 9?

III. THE PRINCIPLE OF PRIVATE
PROPERTY

A. D. LINDSAY, M.A., Fellow and Tutor of Balliol

College, Oxford . . . . . . . 65

M103878

vi PROPERTY

IV. THE BIBLICAL AND EARLY
CHRISTIAN IDEA OF PROPERTY

PAGE

By the Rev. VERNON BARTLET, D.D. (St. Andrews],
Professor of Church History in Mansfield College,
Oxford , 83

V. THE THEORY OF PROPERTY IN
MEDIAEVAL THEOLOGY

By the Rev. A. J. CARLYLE, D.Lrrr., Chaplain and
Lecturer in Political Science and Economics, Uni-
versity College, Oxford . . . . .117

VI. THE INFLUENCE OF THE RE-
FORMATION ON IDEAS CONCERNING
WEALTH AND PROPERTY

By H. G. WOOD, M.A., Late Fellow of Jesus College,
Cambridge ; Lecturer at Woodbrooke Settlement,
Birmingham . . . . . . 133

VII. PROPERTY AND PERSONALITY

By the Rev. HENRY SCOTT HOLLAND, D.D., Regius
Professor of Divinity, Oxford, and Canon of Christ
Church . . . . . . . .169

INDEX .

INTRODUCTION

By the BISHOP OF OXFORD

I THINK that I shall best justify my appearance as
introducing this volume of Essays if I explain the
circumstances of their origin. Dr. Bartlet, of Mans-
field College, Oxford, had written a letter to the
British Weekly strongly urging upon Christians the
duty of reconsidering their ideas about property in the
light of the Bible doctrine of stewardship the doctrine
that God the Creator is the only absolute owner of all
things or persons that " all things come of Him " and
are " His own," and that we men hold what we hold as
stewards for the purposes of His Kingdom, with only a
relative and dependent ownership limited at every point
by the purpose for which it was entrusted to us. He
was good enough to send me his letter and to suggest
that we might combine to issue some literature of a
popular kind about the duties and rights of property
based on this Biblical doctrine.

Naturally I felt a cordial sympathy with the idea, but
I said that before anything of a popular kind was issued,
I thought that we needed some more thorough or philo-
sophical treatment of property in idea and history. The
Bible doctrine by itself makes an appeal of tremendous
force to the individual conscience. But the individual,
however deeply stirred in his conscience, however fully
convinced that he must not conform himself to the ideas

viii PROPERTY

of property which happen to be current in society but
must assert the Christian principle, finds himself in fact
in the bonds of an organized system of property. By
himself he can do very little. As a consumer, as a
shareholder, as a tradesman, as an owner of land, as
a shop assistant, as a clerk, as a workman, he finds
himself paralysed by the system of which inevitably he
forms a part. The system is not unalterable. It has
altered profoundly in more directions than one within
recent history, and is altering. But at every stage it
holds the individual in its grasp. Not even by "going
out of the world," not even were he to do so strange a
thing as to become a monk, can he get out of it. The
clothes he wears, the food he eats, the railways he
travels by, the books he buys, the State he belongs to,
hold him in the grip of the system. What he cries out
for, when his conscience is awakened, is not merely
personal guidance, but also ideas which can be applied
to society ; not merely again schemes for law-making,
but ideas such as must lie behind law-making and
without which law-making is in vain. He wants an
ideal of property, a principle of property, such as will
tend to form a corporate conscience, at first among those
who are consciously dissatisfied with things as they are
and consciously in want of a theory, and then more
widely in society as a whole.

The Lord Chancellor, Lord Haldane, has just 1 been
speaking noble and suggestive words to the lawyers of
the American Bar Association on the power of a common
mind, or common feeling as to what is legitimate and
illegitimate, when it has become instinctive and dominant
in a society. But this common mind about property is
conspicuously lacking amongst us. We are groping in
the dark. We are familiar with the traditional cry of
"the rights of property," and we are painfully familiar
also with the disastrous wrongs which the law and custom

1 September i, 1913.

INTRODUCTION ix

of property as it exists among us has inflicted and is
inflicting. But we want a theory, a principle to guide
us. We cannot act with any power as mere individuals
without a corporate mind and conscience on the subject ;
and we can form no corporate mind and conscience
without a clear principle. It was this principle, this
philosophy of property, in which, when I listened to
Dr. Bartlet's appeal, I felt myself lacking. Without it I
cannot play my part effectively as a citizen and still less
as a moral teacher. Any moral teaching which is to
grip men's minds requires it as a background. There-
fore, before engaging in a popular propaganda, I needed
to clear up the principle of property.

So I felt : so I knew others were feeling. And, Dr.
Bartlet agreeing, we set to work to get written a volume
of essays on property in which the subject should be
treated both from the standpoint of philosophy and of
religion. Divisions of the subjects were easily sug-
gested, and names of willing writers were finally forth-
coming ; and the present volume is the result of our
efforts. Mr. Leonard Hobhouse begins with a state-
ment of the early history of property and its later
developments. Dr. Rashdall and Mr. Lindsay deal with
the principle of property from the side of philosophy,
historically and critically. Dr. Bartlet, Dr. Carlyle, and
Mr. Wood give us the history of the treatment of pro-
perty in Christendom from the side of religion. Dr.
Holland concludes with an essay on the aspect of the
matter which the previous essays have shown to be of the
first importance the relation of property to personality.
Some differences, of emphasis at least, will be felt
between different writers, but not such as to interfere
with a marked unity of tendency and result. After
reading these essays, I ask myself, How far have I and
those who share my need for guidance towards a working
principle of property got what we sought ? I answer
the question for myself by saying that the writers give

x PROPERTY

me the impression of having got to the root of the
matter ; they write with thorough and adequate know-
ledge and genuine impartiality ; and as a result they
help me most effectively to a standing-ground on cer-
tain dominant ideas or constructive principles by which
I can guide myself and feel assurance in seeking to
guide others, ideas and principles such as ought to have
power to form a corporate conscience or common mind
about property in the men of to-day to act both as a
secure basis of policy in promoting reform and as a
ground of appeal to the Christian conscience.

Mr. Hobhouse shows the way in his distinction
between property "for use" and property "for power."
This is a most fruitful distinction. Aristotle was the
first to make the familiar appeal on behalf of private
property that it is necessary for the free development
of the higher life in the individual, and is the most
effective stimulus to character and personal exertion.
We are all familiar with the argument, and we feel its
force to the full. The average man wants the sphere
which he can call " his own " to stimulate him to
develop himself, to get room to move freely and
realize what he is capable of. Now Aristotle is able
calmly to contemplate this self-realization as the
privilege of the few the freemen or citizens while
the larger mass of the inhabitants of his city are to be
slaves, men conceived to exist not for themselves but
for their masters. To us this distinction is intolerable.
We are bound to believe that, whatever inequalities
must subsist among men, every man has the divine and
equal right to realize himself. The success of a civiliza-
tion for us must be measured not by the amount and
character of its products or material wealth, nor by the
degree of well-being which it renders possible for a
privileged class, but by the degree in which it enables
all its members to feel that they have the chance of
making the best of themselves, to feel that an adequate

INTRODUCTION xi

measure of free self-realization is granted them. On
this ground then our civilization is open to the most
serious indictment. Property " for use " what a man
needs for true freedom, what even at the utmost he is
able to use is a very limited quantity on the whole.
Very speedily, as it expands, it becomes " property for
power " : it becomes at last the almost unmeasured
control by the few rich, not of any amount of un-
conscious material, but of other men whose opportunity
to live and work and eat becomes subject to their will.
That is where property has so manifestly gone wrong.
In our own civilization we find vast masses of men
and women who cannot be reasonably described as
having any adequate measure of property for use.
They cannot go out into life with the security of free
men. They cannot, within reasonable limits, control
their own destiny. They cannot realize themselves.
They are "hands" for other men to use. The con-
viction rises in our mind as we contemplate the facts
that something has gone very wrong with our tenure
of property : that we need by peaceful means, and, if it
may be, by general consent, to accomplish such a re-
distribution of property as shall reduce the inordinate
amount of "property for power" in the hands of the
few and give to all men, as far as may be, in reason-
able measure " property for use." Then we ask our-
selves, Are we in entertaining such an ambition violating
any sacred right of property ? We interrogate the
philosophers, and we find under Dr. Rashdall's guid-
ance that we can discern no absolute right of property.
"Its justification must depend upon no a priori principle
but upon its social effects." We may say that a man
has a divine right to realize his being : and this involves
a certain right of property. But this goes but a very
little way. Moreover, from the first man is a social
animal. He realizes himself in communities. Property
is made possible and secured by the community, which

xii PROPERTY

becomes in developed society the State. The State exists
to enable its members to develop a worthy human life.
A State must be judged, and should judge itself, by its
tendency to generate in all its citizens a worthy type
of life to make them happy and progressive beings
who feel that life is worth living. If at any stage it finds
that the institution of property, as it exists, is fostering
luxury and exaggerated power in a few, and enslaving
or hindering the many, there is nothing to prevent
it rectifying what is amiss. Property is relative to
character : it is a means towards a good life, and a
good life for all men. The State is free to alter its
laws or its methods so as to secure its better distribu-
tion. As it is only the State which enables a man
to become rich, so, if wealth proves inimical to the
general development, the possessors of wealth have no
legitimate claim to urge against the State taking measures
to redress the balance, provided that the end which the
State has in view is the true end the real welfare of all
its citizens. No doubt, as Mr. Lindsay shows, it is a
difficult process to guard the sacred right of personal
freedom against State tyranny on the one hand, and on
the other to prevent the excess of individualism which
means in practice the enslavement of the many to the
few. But because it is difficult to direct human life
aright individually or socially, we must not, therefore,
abandon what alone makes human life worth living
the effort to realize a worthy ideal.

And what has religion the Christian religion which
exists to teach men that the end of their being is to
serve the glory of God and the real good equally of
themselves and of their fellows to say to the institution
of property ? The Old Testament, on which Christianity
is based, describes the theocratic community ; and its
moral principles have, as the Christian is taught to
believe, a permanent validity to be developed and not
to be superseded. Well then, a man cannot read the

INTRODUCTION xiii

law and the prophets from the point of view of one who
would think rightly about private property, without
seeing how, alike in the institutions of the law and in the
teaching of the prophets, the intention is to recognize
it, indeed, as having God's sanction, but to restrain it
by a peremptory insistence on the right of God, the
only absolute owner, and the rights of our fellow men,
especially the weaker and poorer members of the State.
Much that we are accustomed to hear called legitimate
insistence upon the rights of property, the Old Testa-
ment would seem to call the robbery of God, and the
grinding of the faces of the poor.

Later the teaching of Jesus Christ about the worth
of each individual, the poorest and the weakest, ex-
pressed itself in the Christian idea of brotherhood, and
the institution of the Church as a body in which " if
one member suffer, all the members suffer with it."
This idea and institution carried with it a doctrine of
property, which echoed our Lord's strong disparage-
ment of wealth, and was in theory and practice highly
communal. The Christians were a persecuted body,
who had no power of controlling the law or practice
of the society of the Empire ; but within their own
"voluntary" society the claim of the brethren was
paramount. The scoffer, Lucian, notes this as their
characteristic : " Their leader, whom they yet adore,
had persuaded them that they were all brethren : in
compliance with his laws they looked with contempt
on all worldly treasures and held everything in
common," or (as this is more accurately expressed),
" It is incredible with what alacrity those people defend
and support their common interests the interest of
any of their number and spare nothing, in short, to
promote it." Thus the Christian church became a
corporation for mutual support, refusing the idler who
would not work, but for the rest accepting the maxim
that they " must provide one another with support,

xiv PROPERTY

with all joy : furnishing those who lack occupation
with employment, and thus with the necessary liveli-
hood. To the workman, work ; to him who cannot
work, mercy (or alms)." l There is no doubt that this
profound sense of the communal claim on private
property and this practically effective sense of brother-
hood produced an economic condition in the Christian
community which was one main cause of its progress.
The Fathers use the strongest language against any
"right of property," which resists the claim of the
needs of the brethren. Dr. Bartlet writes with a
studied moderation about all this, and shows no little
insight in accounting for the disappointing fact that,
when Christianity became the established religion, it
did so little to impress its ideal of property upon the
law and custom of the later Empire. But certainly
the church bore the strongest witness to the idea of
property as a trust for the common good. And in
no way is this more strikingly shown than in its
identification of "charity" that is, charity in the
narrower sense of almsgiving with justice. 2 The
needy can claim our alms as a matter of justice : to
retain more property than we strictly need is a violation
of justice, and not merely a failure to perform a work
of supererogation. Lord Hugh Cecil has recently
drawn a strong distinction between charity and justice.
He says "originally the relief of the poor was based on
the duty of Christian charity, and not on any supposed
right of justice." 3 As far as Early Christianity is con-
cerned the distinction here drawn would be repudiated.
To withhold charity is to refuse justice. And when we
pass from the Early Christian period to the Middle
Ages, when the whole fabric of society was in Christian

1 Pseudo-Clement, Ef. 8 ; see Harnaclc, Expansion of Christianity (Williams &
Norgate), i. p. 218.

2 This is especially but not exclusively characteristic of the Westerns Cyprian,
Lactantius, Ambrose, etc.

3 Conservatism (Williams & Norgate), p. 172.

INTRODUCTION xv

hands we find the old principle asserted. Charity in
the form of tithe, and more generally distribution of
wealth to need, is still asserted to be justice and the
withholding of it injustice. " No man has really the
right to hold for himself more than he needs." And
the Stoic principle of a law of nature behind and con-
trolling the law of the State, is adopted in dealing with
property. Private property, and laws maintaining the
rights of private property, are necessary as a protection
against the lawlessness of fallen human nature ; but
behind the laws is the original principle by which all
things are common, which gives to every man his right
to what he needs, so that even stealing, St. Thomas
maintains, is no stealing if the need is sufficiently
urgent, and property has no claim which is valid
against the natural or fundamental right of every man
to enjoy the bounty of the Creator. It ought to be
added that in mediaeval society a very large share of
property was held by the religious houses, who at
their best maintained in practical action the principle of
voluntary poverty, and at their lower level exhibited
on the largest scale the principle of communal owner-
ship within their own membership and for the sake of
the poor.

Amongst the Reformers there were some who main-
tained the old Christian instinct unimpaired. No
nobler practical insistence on the true conception of
property can be found than is to be found in the
sermons of Hugh Latimer ; but, on the whole, the
candid reader of Mr. Wood's most interesting essay,
with its valuable catena of quotations, will feel that
Protestantism in general, and not least our English
Protestantism, embodied an excessive individualism, 1 as

1 It may be the case that the greater individualism in the conception of
property which characterizes Protestant literature would be found to be more or less
characteristic of the thought of Europe generally, whether Protestant or Catholic,
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and to be due, not only to Protestant
tendencies, but to a widespread change in the economic structure of society.

xvi PROPERTY

in other respects so also in regard to property. It
abandoned much of the content which the Bible or
earlier Christianity had given to the commandment,
"Thou shalt not steal." It ushers in the epoch in
which the doctrine of the right of property is largely
stripped of its old limitations. 1

What are we to say, then, about the still dominant
individualism, the assertion of an almost unlimited
right of acquiring, retaining, and perpetuating property,
which breaks out against either any strongly urged
moral claim for voluntarily giving better conditions
to the poorer workers as an act of justice, or against
any action of the State which tends in the direction
of a more equitable distribution of the proceeds of
industry ?

We are bound to say that, looking at the matter
philosophically, it has no validity. The particular laws
which at any moment regulate the holding of property,
or determine the burden which it is to bear for the
public good, are laws of the State ; it is the State which
alone enables property to be gathered and held; and there
is no legitimate claim which property can make against
what appears to be the welfare of the State. It is hardly
possible to state the principle too strongly. We are
only saying the same thing in other words if we say
that the tenure of property in any community must be
judged by its tendency to promote what alone is the

1 But out of the heart of the eighteenth century we do well to recall that Bishop
Butler, in defending the right of the lay holder of what had formerly been Church property
to retain his property with a good conscience, does so on grounds which involves the
principle that there is no absolute or perpetual right of property. " Property in general
is, and must be, regulated by the laws of the community. . . . Every donation to
the Christian church is a human donation and no more j and therefore cannot give
a divine right, but such a right only as must be subject in common with all other
property fo human laws. . . . The persons who gave these lands to the church had
themselves no right in perpetuity in them, consequently could convey no such right
to the church. But all scruples concerning the lawfulness of laymen possessing these
lands go upon the supposition that the church had such a right in perpetuity in them ;
and therefore all those scruples must be groundless as going upon a false supposi-
tion." See a letter of Bishop Butler's in Fitzgerald's edition of the Analogy, Preface,
p. xciii.

INTRODUCTION xvii

real end of civil society that is, the best possible life
for man in general and all men in particular. If it
appears that the conditions of property-holding at any
particular period sacrifice the many to the few, and tend
to starve the vitality or destroy the hope or depress
the efforts of masses of men and women, there is no
legitimate claim that property can make against the
alteration of conditions by gradual and peaceable
means.

Can such a charge be made out against the present
conditions under which in our country property is
acquired and held or handed on ? I fear that it can be
made out and pressed home.

The stimulus of unlimited acquisition, it is some-
times pleaded, is necessary to bring out of men their
greatest capacity and energy. If you restrain a man's
freedom to acquire, you damp his energy. But what
about the energy of the masses of men who can acquire
no property or no sufficient property to give them
secure status and hope ? If you go some way towards
equalizing opportunity, as between one man and
another, will you not stimulate a thousand energies
and interests to one which you may check ?

The most formidable form of this plea is that which
represents to us that in modern industry the most im-
portant factor is the brain of the great organizer ; that
this will only work under the stimulus of unlimited
acquisition of wealth and personal power ; and that if
in our own country this power of unlimited acquisition
is restricted, the men of greatest initiative will go to
countries where no such restrictions exist, and our own
industrial life will suffer. This is a terrible argument
the argument that what is most powerful in men
cannot be induced to act in the public interest but
only on the motive of unrestricted selfishness. There
are many experiences in modern industrial life to be
set against it. It may, however, be a motive for pro-

XV 111

PROPERTY

ceeding gradually in reforming industrial conditions,
and a ground for strengthening international fellowship
among reformers, so that similar tendencies may be
apparent in all countries. But it can never be a
ground for tying the hands of justice ; and it leaves
altogether out of account the stimulus to industry
which is to be anticipated in any country in which
more and more men in the industrial world can feel
that it is worth while to do their best.

Property in some sense is necessary for personality.
That is certainly true. Let us therefore be careful to
guard against any invasion of the real liberty of persons,
let us maintain the right of property " for use." But
how overwhelming is the indictment against present
conditions in their bearing on personality, the personality
of the mass of our countrymen. On this line Dr.
Holland brings the series of essays to a conclusion with
an argument which seems to me to be of overwhelming
force. And he calls attention to the root fact about
personality that it is in its fundamental being a social
thing a relation of one individual to another ; and
that a legitimate development of personality involves a
legitimate development of fellowship.

The Roman poet contrasts the extravagance of
individual wealth in his own time with what he dis-
cerns to have been the ancient Roman ideal :

Privatus illis census erat brevis,
Commune magnum. 1

Their private property was small : what was in common, that
was large.

These words echo in our mind. We cannot get rid
of the feeling that individualism in property has over-
done itself: that it is working disastrous havoc :
that the cry for justice from masses of men and

1 Horace, Carm. ii. 15.

INTRODUCTION xix

women is a cry which is legitimate ; and if it is a legiti-
mate cry, then most certainly it behoves us not to
wait till its claim can be enforced, grudging every inch
that is yielded unwillingly to "labour " under the
pressure of compulsion, but rather as free men to face
the facts and gird ourselves willingly for reform, even
if it entail for us personal sacrifice.

And here comes in the claim of our religion. We
have been unfaithful to its ancient instincts and to the
spirit of our Master. Speaking of the sixteenth and
again of the nineteenth century, and referring, I think,
to Europe at large, Harnack says : " The church was
generally on the wrong side, a fact which still rankles
in the memory of the nation, and is not without influence
on the economic struggle of the present day." l The
modern church has generally been on the wrong side.
Can we deny it ? Can we deny that its conceptions of
property and of the obligations of property, and its
attitude towards the real needs of the masses of men
who have held no property, or received no adequate
supply of what life needs for its development, have
been wholly different from what the teaching of the
prophets and our Lord, and our Fathers in Christendom,
would have had them to be ? In this respect, as in
others, our religion to-day is on its trial. The place it is
to hold in the minds of men in general and the genuine-
ness which can be ascribed to our profession of brother-
hood, depend on our courageous readiness to think
again what our Christian principles mean. What do
we honestly believe is God's will Christ's will for
en ? What do we mean when we say that we hold
ur property as stewards for God's purposes ? Do we
really believe that covetousness and the desire to
accumulate wealth yes, and wealth itself deserve all
that our Lord and His apostles said of them ? Do we
really acknowledge that if we are failing to redeem our

1 The Social Gospel (Williams & Norgate), p. 63.

xx INTRODUCTION

brothers and sisters from misery and want, we are
failing to redeem Christ ? And if we genuinely mean
what we should mean, and believe what we say, are we,
as Christians, ready for a deep and courageous and
corporate act of penitence and reparation ?

I

THE HISTORICAL EVOLUTION
OF PROPERTY, IN FACT AND IN IDEA

BY

L. T. HOBHOUSE, M.A.

PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY, LONDON UNIVERSITY

SUMMARY

1. The general notion of property. It is a right of control over things
which society recognizes. It may be absolute or partial, held by one
person or many, or by a community, but it must be exclusive as against
others, and it must have some permanence.

2. The connection of property with rational purpose, and with freedom.

3. The opposition, in this regard, between property held for use by its
owner, and property as a means of controlling the labour of others.

4. Property is a recognized institution in all known societies ; but in
the simpler societies it is rarely, if ever, a source of "power." This side
develops with the advance of material civilization, and culminates in the
modern inequalities of wealth.

5. Of theories of property we may distinguish (a) the Communistic,
which really attacks the whole principle of property ; (b) the Labour theory ;
(c) the Individualistic theory, which finds it essential to character ; and (d}
the Socialistic theory. Need of discrimination between property for " use "
and for " power," and of the extension of certain forms of State ownership
in the interest of personal rights.

I vsU'.'-J.j

THE HISTORICAL EVOLUTION
OF PROPERTY, IN FACT AND IN IDEA. 1

A satisfactory account of the development of property
in general has not yet been written, and perhaps
in the present state of our knowledge cannot be
written. In no department of the study of com-
parative institutions are the data more elusive and
unsatisfactory. The divergence between legal theory
and economic fact, between written law and popular
custom, between implied rights and actual enjoyment,
enables one and the same institution to be painted and,
within limits, quite honestly and faithfully painted in
very different colours. The legally minded historian
will lay stress on forms or principles which have very
little bearing on the actual life of the people. The
economic historian, impatient of these subtleties, will
ask us t'o look at the actual working of the institution,
only to find that by some turn of events the dormant
legal principle is awakened, and becomes a potent and
perhaps deadly force in the working of a system.
The theorist with a generalization to defend can always,
by judicious selection and omission, quote travellers,
ethnologists, early codes, or points of contemporary
custom on his side ; for he is singularly unfortunate

1 In this paper the social functions of property are examined by the standard of
purely humanitarian ethics.

4 PROPERTY i

if he cannot find something either in the every day
working of the institution or in its theoretical implica-
tions, which, by ignoring other aspects, may be made
to tell on his side. But any one who considers the
extraordinary difficulty which our own social historians
find 'in pteserttl&g ^a perfectly just picture of landed
property in England m any one century, to say nothing
of \ its\4^velQpJneyitVthr0ugh the centuries, will realize
'the kind 'of caution which science will demand in re-
constructing the true character of property among a
simple people who have no written documents from
the statements of travellers, even if they are skilled
observers.

A single illustration may suffice. In a simple
community practising extensive agriculture a man tells
a traveller that this is " his " land, and that his
neighbour's land. The statement is duly printed, and
in the end finds its way into a volume on the develop-
ment of property as evidence of the individual owner-
ship of land, without so much as a note to show the
reader whether there has been any enquiry into the
conditions of tenure. Another observer may state
with equal truth that the land " belongs " to the tribe,
and this remark figures in a work of different tendency
as equally good evidence in favour of primitive com-
munism, though there may be nothing to show in
what form the land is actually used by the members
of the tribe. In some of the Australian tribes good
observers tell us that there is no such thing as private
property in land. 1 Among others, other writers assure
us that land neither belongs to a tribe nor to a group
of families but to a single male. 2 Does the difference
really lie between the tribes or between the observers ?
Some light may be thrown on the question and on the

1 Spencer and Gillen, The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, p. 27, etc.

2 E.g. Grey and Eyre, cited in Hildebrand's Recht und Sitte auf den >ver-
schiedenen Kulturs(ufen t p. 4.

i THE EVOLUTION OF PROPERTY 5

general difficulties of method by a passage in Mr.
Hewitt's classical work. 1 Among the coast tribes of
New South Wales it appears that the land wherein a
child is born is " his " to hunt in, and even a father or
mother may thus " acquire " land when a child is born
to them outside their own locality. " The place where
a man is born," said an old man, " is his own locality
and he has always the right to hunt over it, and all
others born there have also the right to do so." It
may safely be said that this is one of the very last
forms of title that would occur to a civilized enquirer.
The effect of his examination of any single native
would be to persuade him that that native owned the
land where he was born. It would only be if he
happened to examine several born in the same district
that he would discover that many men called the same
land their own, and that their property in it could
neither be described as communal nor as individual.

Where data are so difficult to ascertain, generaliza-
tion must be unusually precarious. At best it may be
possible here to set out a few salient points which may
serve to throw light on the very diverse functions of
property in the social system, the variations which the
conception of property has undergone, and the manner
in which these are connected with the general develop-
ment of society. With this object we will briefly
consider (i) the general notion of property, (2) the
psychological conditions on which it rests, (3) certain
aspects of its social functions, (4) some of the forms
which property has assumed at several stages of social
development, and (5) the light thrown by these con-
siderations on certain typical theories of property which
will be briefly reviewed.

1 The Native Tribes of South East Australia, p. 8 3 .

6 PROPERTY i

i. THE NOTION OF PROPERTY

For purposes of social theory property is to be
conceived in terms of the control of man over things.
Man needs food to eat, implements to procure it, land
to work upon, and for that matter to stand and move
upon. That he may supply his needs at all, he must
at least temporarily control the implement that he is
using, and the spot on which he is working. But that
this temporary control or possession may become
property, certain further conditions are essential. His
possession must in the first place be recognized by
others, i.e. it must be of the nature of a right. In the
second place, with regard to things of a permanent
nature, his right must also have a certain permanence.
He must be able to count on the use of the thing.
His right over it, though it may be limited in time,
must not be confined to the moment when he has it in
his hands, but must be respected in his absence.
Thirdly, his control must be exclusive. If he shares
the control of the thing with others, then it is not his
private property. But if he and his partners control
it to the exclusion of the rest of the world, then it is
their joint or their common property. If on the other
hand all the world alike can use it, then it is not
property at all. Property may be private, joint, or
common, but it must vest in some person or persons,
and it must be exclusive of other persons.

Exclusive control, however, it must be borne in
mind, does not necessarily mean complete control.
A may control a thing for one purpose to the ex-
clusion of all the world, B among the rest ; yet B may
control that same thing for another purpose to the
exclusion of all the world, A among the rest. When
I take a room in an inn for the night, it is "mine"
for the night to the exclusion of any one else. But
the landlord has permanent rights in the room which

i THE EVOLUTION OF PROPERTY 7

are exclusive as against me. It may be objected that
we ought to say that the landlord has the property,
while he gives me only the right of using it. This
may seem to accord better with usage, but in the final
analysis of property it seems desirable for several reasons
to insist that all forms of control are species of one
genus. The control over a thing may be complete or
partial, and the partial control may ascend by so many
gradations till it becomes complete, that it is difficult to
know where to draw a line. The only distinction of
principle seems to be that between control of a thing
for use and enjoyment, and control for the purpose of
disposal, sale, exchange, or bequest. The latter kind
of control may indeed be regarded as property in the
sense of eminent ownership, but to restrict property to
this sense would be to leave the manner of its use and
enjoyment out of account. A man may only be life-
tenant of a landed estate, its disposal after his death
being determined by law or the decision of the com-
munity, or a previous owner's will. Yet while he lives
the man may have complete control of its management,
and from generation to generation the same conditions
may recur. To leave the life interest out of account
would then be to divorce the conception of property
from the main conditions of practical control.

It will be seen then that property is a principle
which admits of variation in several distinct directions.
It is a control which may be more or less fully recog-
nized and guaranteed by society. It may be more or
less permanent, more or less dependent on present use
and possession or enjoyment. It may be concentrated
in one hand, or common to many. It may extend to
more, or to fewer, of the purposes to which a thing
may be put. But that the control may be property at
all, it must in some sort be recognized, in some sort
independent of immediate physical enjoyment, and at
some point exclusive of control by other persons.

8 PROPERTY i

Within these limits there is room for indefinite varia-
tion in many directions, and the variations are not
necessarily dependent on one another.

2. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PROPERTY

These elementary considerations help us in deter-
mining the psychological basis of property, as to which
a mere note must here suffice. Some writers speak of
an instinct of property. But this is to simplify over-
much. No doubt the higher animals have a rudi-
mentary property. The bone which your dog has
once seized is u his " bone. He resents the attempt
to take it from him with an excitement which he does
not show in respect to a bone which he has not yet
taken. My tame jackdaw steals my pencil and makes
off hurriedly with it with all the flutter of conscious
theft, or he will play a game with it, dropping it pro-
vocatively and picking it up smartly, or going straight
at my ringers the wretch ! when I attempt to recapture
it. What happens in these cases seems to be that the
interest which a class of objects excites either through
their use for food or, in the exceptional case of the
jackdaw, through their inherent attractiveness as nice,
bright, peckable things, easily portable in one's bill is
focussed by the first act of seizure or even of attention
on a particular object, and that thereupon all the train
of feelings or reactions attendant on, or subsidiary to,
its use are called forth in response to that object rather
than others. This constitutes the mental appropriation
of an object ; and not only for man, but for the dog
with its buried bone, and the bird with its nest, and
the jackdaw with its "cache," the appropriated object
becomes a permanent basis of action, something that it
can count upon and go back to at need. For man, at
all events, his property is above all something that he
can rely upon as a permanent home, permanent means

i THE EVOLUTION OF PROPERTY 9

of subsistence or enjoyment. Property is thus an
integral element in an ordered life of purposeful
activity. It is, at bottom for the same reason, an integral
element in a free life. This distinguishes property
from mere adequate provision with material goods.
A man who has his meals set down before him all
nicely prepared and measured out by expert authority
may be well nourished ; but as he has no property
beyond his actual plateful, so he has no freedom but
to take it or give it to the cat. The man who has a
shilling in his pocket is free to eat or drink what he
likes up to the limit of the shilling. He may not
get so good or sustaining a meal, but he gets his own
choice. The man who has a weekly wage is, other
things being equal, more free than a man paid by
truck, and a man who works on his own land with his
own implements is more free, other things being equal,
than the wage-earner. At each point the more a man
can count on his own exertions applied to his own
property, the more he can direct his own activity on
the lines which suit his taste. Some measure of pro-
perty appears, in short, to be the essential basis of
liberty ; and conversely the sense of freedom in enjoy-
ment ranks along with the sense of security and per-
manence among the complex constituents of the pride
and joy of ownership.

3. SOCIAL ASPECTS OF PROPERTY : USE AND POWER

Unfortunately what is liberty for one man is often
the negation of liberty for another. In a developed
society a man's property is not merely something which
he controls and enjoys, which he can make the basis of
his labour and the scene of his ordered activities, but
something whereby he can control another man and
make it the basis of that man's labour and the scene of
activities ordered by himself. The abstract right of

io PROPERTY i

property is apt to ignore these trifling distinctions ; and
theories of property are founded, for example on the
right of the labourer to his produce, which completely
ignore the fact that as industry develops, the most con-
spicuous function of property is to secure a part of
one man's labour-product for the benefit of another.
Both the history and the philosophy of property turn
on these two relations of the institution to social life as
a whole. On the one hand property is the material
basis of a permanent, ordered, purposeful, and self-
directed activity. Such upon the whole is the property
which a man directly uses or enjoys by himself or in
association with his nearest and dearest. On the other
hand property is a form of social organization, whereby
the labour of those who have it not is directed by and
for the enjoyment of those that have. In this sense
the control of the owner is essentially a control of labour.
It is that " alchemy " whereby the " Seigneur lounging
in the CEil de Boeuf " extracts the third nettle from
the gatherer in the fields and calls it rent. It does
not essentially consist in the handling and use of the
material thing. It is consistent with as little knowledge
of the thing as the average shareholder of an Argen-
tine railway possesses of the whereabouts of " his "
track, who knows that the dividends come in with fair
regularity every six months, though he might have
difficulty in locating the terminus of the line within
500 miles.

Now these two functions of property, the control of
things, which gives freedom and security, and the control
of persons through things, which gives power to the
owner, are very different. In some respects they are
radically opposed, yet from the nature of the case they
are intertwined, and their relationship can be traced
through the history of the institution, some phases of
which may now be indicated.

i THE EVOLUTION OF PROPERTY n

4. PHASES OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF PROPERTY

In the general sense here given property is found
in every known society. A man's clothing, weapons,
and tools, a woman's ornaments, the family hut or
cave, or at least a marked portion thereof, 1 are from
the first recognized as belonging to the man, the woman,
or the family. The inventory of a Vedda's very simple
personal estate is given by Dr. and Mrs. Seligmann :

One axe, bow and arrows, three pots, a deer skin, a flint
and steel, and supply of tinder, a gourd for carrying water, a
betel pouch containing betel covers, and some form of box for
holding lime, also a certain amount of cloth besides that on
the person.

To these personal belongings a man has a right in
the sense in which rights are recognized by simple
societies. Theft would at lowest be resented by the
individual, and there would be a customary form of
reparation which he would exact. As soon as any sort
of public court is formed it will deal with this right
and the wrongs arising out of it, on the same general
principles and by the same methods as with others. 2
To discuss these questions further would be to examine
the social basis of rights in general, which is foreign to
our purpose. Property is from the first, to all appear-
ances, a right recognized much in the same fashion as
rights of the person or marital rights are recognized,
and on this side the development follows the same
general lines in all cases. The important point for us

1 E.g. In the " Long House " of the Iroquois and other North American Indians.
Dargun, " Ursprung und Geschichte des Eigentums " (Z. f. -vergleichende Rechts-
lumemchaft, Bd. v. p. 37), insists on this point. The Vedda families, according to
Dr. Seligmann, have their proper place in the joint caves.

2 In nine cases out of ten the "thievishness" attributed by travellers to simple
peoples is seen on careful reading to mean that they disregarded the proprietary rights
of the whites. Could these peoples describe the morals of the whites, what might
they say of the civilized man's regard for their property? It is true that in some
cases belongings are taken without leave and without censure, but these are certainly
the exception.

12 PROPERTY i

to consider is what sort of things are objects of pro-
perty, and whose property they are ; or in more ultimate
analysis, What sort of exclusive control is exerted over
things, and by whom ?

Now among the simplest known tribes, who live
by gathering fruits, digging roots, and hunting, the
possible objects of property may be divided into two
categories. On the one hand there are the trivial per-
sonal belongings that have been mentioned. On the
other hand there is the land, uncleared and uncultivated,
but the one great means of subsistence. Of the first
kind there is private ownership ; but it will be apparent
that the life of the little society will be determined
principally by liberty or restriction in the matter of
hunting or collecting food, that is to say, by the owner-
ship of the land. How then is land owned in these
communities ? Is it communal or is it personal ? If
we could answer this question clearly and unambigu-
ously, we should get as near as the evidence is ever
likely to bring us to a solution of the problem of
primitive property, and in particular of the vexed
questions surrounding the nature of the village com-
munity. Unfortunately the evidence is not altogether
clear and unambiguous. In some instances the com-
munal tenure of the land is beyond doubt. The case
of the Central Australians already quoted may serve as
an instance. In the first place, among these people the
tribe has its known area, with boundaries recognized
by the neighbouring tribes. Within the tribe there
are divisions and subdivisions, the ultimate unit being
a " local group " of a few families in one tribe forty
individuals constitute the largest existing group who
roam about an area which, like that of the tribe as a
whole, is clearly defined. Within this area there is no
individual property. It is free to all members of the
group, but no one else may hunt in it without per-
mission, and the boundaries are habitually observed.

i THE EVOLUTION OF PROPERTY 13

Moreover, ownership is associated with the centres
within the area in which the souls of ancestors who
lived in the Alcheringa the great long ago are de-
posited, which souls are reincarnated in living members
of the group. Within the terms of our definition it is
clear that this area is the common property of the group.
Writers who deny communal property altogether among
the hunting peoples can only deal with a case like this
by calling it not property but sovereignty. It is true
that the group is substantially an autonomous unit, but
the only deduction that can be drawn from this is that
political control if we may use such an expression
here and the right of property are not at this stage
differentiated. Indeed, in the case of land this
differentiation is not completely effected till a relatively
late stage in social development, and it may be doubted
whether a complete differentiation is ever possible
without socially disastrous consequences. In any case
the effective control of the land is in the hands of the
group. No single member has an exclusive right
against the group, while the group has an exclusive
right against all others, and this right is recognized by
the others. We cannot refuse to call this common
ownership ; and if the same system obtained among all
hunting people, the starting-point in the development
of property in land would be perfectly clear.

But this is not the case. The necessities of hunting
and the collection of food may lead to further sub-
division, and we find cases, both in Australia and else-
where, where land is owned by an individual hunter
and his family. 1 We saw above that some ambiguity

1 In ten Australian tribes or groups common ownership is pretty clearly
indicated, and in five family ownership. But several authors, e.g. Lang, Grey, Eyre,
Curr, assert individual ownership. The evidence, however, is often conflicting and
in some cases we can only suppose a kind of dual ownership. Thus J. Browne,
writing in Dr. Petermann's Mitteilungen for 1856, describes four West Australian
tribes which he knew well, as having land possessed by families and individuals j
but he remarks that it is difficult to say in what private property consists, as the
tribe roams the whole area without distinction, while if a stranger trespasses, it

i 4 PROPERTY i

may attach to the evidence in these cases. Let us
take an instance where the report is precise. The
Veddas are organized in very small groups of families
closely related to one another. Each group has its
definite hunting area, but within it each man has his
own land. This land passes by regular inheritance, or
may be given to a son or a son-in-law. It may also be
alienated. But whether it is given to the natural heir
or to any one else it can only be with the assent of
every adult male of the group. 1 In this instance it
is clear that immediate ownership is private, and that
the eminent ownership is in the group. The control
of the group secures the important point, that access to
the land will be maintained for those who are by birth
its members. As long as this principle is maintained
land may be communal property, or it may be personal,
or the two principles may be intermixed, but in any
case it will be held for use and not for power. Its
tenure will be occupational, and I think we may pro-
visionally conclude that this is the general characteristic
of primitive property in land, that is to say, of the one
essential basis of production in the lowest stages of
development. 2

is resented and a fight ensues. Perhaps the only prerogative of the owner, he says, is
to take the lead in this resistance. As to family property, it must be borne in mind
that the Australian local group is often so small as to be little more than an enlarged
family, so that family and group ownership pass into one another. It should also be
noted that rules for the division of the spoils of the hunt are common in Australia.
Of twenty cases of which I have information, the food is divided between the whole
camp in ten ; between the relations, including the wife's relations, in six ; while in
four the rules are not specified.

1 Seligmann, op. cit. pp. 107, in.

2 Among fifty-five tribes of "hunters and gatherers " as to whose property system
I have found some account, forty-four appears to hold land either as property of the
tribe or of a smaller group clan, village, or band within the tribe. Of the remainder
five are the Australian tribes in which ownership is attributed to the family, and
there are left six cases of individual ownership, to which perhaps a few more
Australian cases ought to be added. In two or three instances ownership is
attributed to the chief, but this seems to be rather as the representative of the
community than as true personal property.

In a few cases special clans monopolized the land or the best part of it. Thus
among the Thlinkeets, according to Swanton (Smithsonian Annual Reports, xxvi),
certain clans had no land of their own, and either used the common land of the

i THE EVOLUTION OF PROPERTY 15

This suggestion is confirmed when we consider the
beginning of agriculture. Land at the outset is cleared
for the raising of a crop. Its fertility is soon exhausted,
perhaps after a single harvest, and the little community
moves on to another spot. But the whole amount
brought under cultivation at any one time is a very
small fraction of the waste belonging to the com-
munity and hunted over by any of its members in-
discriminately. No difficulty is made about the right
to clear a field, but whatever one man has cleared
belongs, at least while he tills it, to himself and his
family. At this stage private property can hardly be
more than a possessory right, for when the last crop
has been taken the clearing is really of less value than
the waste. " Arva per annos mutant et superest ager."
There is uncleared land in abundance. It belongs to
the community and is open to any one to break up. 1
Thus there is temporary private possession and per-
manent common ownership. But on this point more

tribe or had to wait until the more fortunate clans had done with their land for the
season. Among the Chilcotin, Carriers, and Western Shushwaps land was the
property of the nobles. In the two former cases, according to Father Morice
(Proceedings of the Canadian Institute, 1893), the heads of non-noble families
might hunt on the land with the chief's permission. In the latter, according to Teit
(Report of the Jesup Expedition), the nobles charged rents on the commons, fined
them for trespass, and drove them off to the more distant tribal grounds quite in the
style of modern civilization. Among the Tsimshian, according to Boas, a clan
retained the right to its land even though it moved away $ but I do not know whether
it could charge anything for its use by others. All these instances are from the
relatively developed hunting and fishing tribes of the west coast of North America,
where class distinctions had come into being.

In the Torres Straits land may be held in individual ownership and is not infre-
quently lent or let for a share in the produce, e.g. a garden is lent on the under-
standing that the first-fruits go to the owner (Haddon, Cambridge Expedition, vol.
iv.). One group of these islands is non-agricultural, and private property also
obtains here, but whether the leasing system is also known is not clear to me.

The figures given above are from an enquiry which is not quite finished and needs
final revision, but are not likely to require any such modification as would invalidate
the general rule that, with a few exceptions such as those mentioned, land in a
community of hunters and gatherers is accessible to all members of a social group.
This, it may be remarked, would hold even in the Australian cases where ownership is
assigned to the individual. There is nowhere any hint of a landless class.

1 Compare the remarks of Von Martius, Zur Ethnographic Amerikas, on
Brazilian land tenure, which are sufficiently clear, notwithstanding the criticisms of
Dargun (Entiuicklungs-Geschichte, pp. 51-54).

1 6 PROPERTY i

than one possibility arises. Agriculture may become a
collective industry, fields being tilled and the harvest
gathered by the common labour, as among the
Karaya tribes, 1 and a special store may be set apart for
the necessitous, as among the Creeks. But more often,
as tillage develops and becomes more intensive, the
temporary occupation becomes permanent. The neces-
sity of letting the land lie fallow may be met by a
two-field or three-field system, and the recurrent
possession of the same plots hardens into permanent
ownership. The holding, however, may still be that of
the family or of the kindred rather than that of the
individual ; and the kindred, living together in a Long
House with stores in common, constitute a smaller and
stricter communism within the community as a whole. 2
But whether through the break-up of the kindred or
as the direct result of the growth of cultivation, 3 land
may be recognized as the private property of the man
who clears or tills it, and may be alienated, sold,, or
bequeathed. 4 Immediate ownership of the cultivated
plots thus passes to the kindred, the family, or the
individual. Still the community may retain certain
eminent rights and certain powers of control : for
example, alienation to an outsider may be forbidden, or
allowed only by common consent of the original group, 5

1 Ehrenreich, Veroff. KSnigl. Museums, Band i.

2 The Iroquois lived in joint houses containing from five to twenty families and
made common store of the food, which was duly distributed among the component
families by the superintending matron. The Creeks lived in clustered houses,
practising a similar communism (Morgan, Houses and House Life, etc., pp. 64-68).

3 The evidence does not justify us in laying down a fixed order leading from the
community through the kin to the individual. It is more likely that development
followed a different course among different people.

4 Thus, among the Kayans of Borneo, according to Niewenhuis (^uer durch
Borneo), unbroken land is accessible to any one, but land once tilled passes into
private ownership and may be let or exchanged. Among the Hill Dyaks,
accor ing to Ling Roth (Natives of Sarawak), land is abundant within the tribal
limits, but very little is individual property, except the private plots near the houses,
which are saleable. The locality of the farms is generally settled by the council
of the tribe, so that one road may serve all. Among the Sea Dyaks a man acquires
a title to the land by clearing it.

5 So in early mediaeval Germany, Schroder, Lehrbuch der deutschen Rcchts-
jreschichte, pp. 307-8,

i THE EVOLUTION OF PROPERTY 17

while the right to acquire new land by clearing requires
a more definite assent from the community or chief
as it becomes more valuable.

Again, the community may retain a general control
of cultivation, and may remain the guardian and ultimate
court of appeal on questions of the rights and duties
of its members, and on all customs regulating the
common life. On this side, the old principle survived
into the manorial courts of our mediaeval system.
Furthermore, the cultivation of the arable is not self-
sufficient. As agriculture develops it requires beasts
of burden, and a right of grazing on the common
pasture and the use of the waste are essential to the
maintenance of the tillage. But the pasture and the
waste remain common ; and if there is meadow land,
its use is duly apportioned by the community in
accordance with the needs of each holding. Lastly, if
holdings become unequal and unsuited to the needs
of families, there may be a conscious effort to maintain
the partnership by a system of periodical redistribution,
as in the case of the Russian mir.

Systems like these, though compatible with a
considerable development of individual ownership, are
still so far primitive that they associate property, not
with power, but with use. 1 At least until property
begins to press on the means of subsistence, every
boy on growing to manhood will have the basis of his
life-economy secured to him by the social structure.
He will succeed to his share in the family land, with
the right to pasture, meadow'and waste, which it carries
with it ; and if, through the growth of the family, the
lot has become too narrow, he will readily gain
the consent of the community to an additional clearing
in the waste. If the pressure of population has begun,

1 In more than one hundred descriptions of land tenure among agricultural and
pastoral peoples of simple culture, I have only found ten cases in which a system of
letting or leasing land is suggested.

C

i 8 PROPERTY i

it is more likely to lead to trouble with neighbouring
peoples than with landlessness and poverty at home.
Its effects will be seen in tribal unrest, migrations, and
wars of conquest. Here then is one possible root of
disorganization. But there are others. Men are by
nature unequal, and one family will thrive while
another decays. If debt - slavery particularly for
non-payment of the wergild is recognized, men will
fall into the hands of creditors for whose benefit in
future they may have to till the land, and prisoners of
war may be put to the same use. 1 Whole tribes,
indeed, may become tributary to a stronger people. 2
Within the community the growth of military organiza-
tion involves the elevation of the chief and his trusted
followers into a nobility standing above the mass of
the free men, and this elevation implies at some point
or another a corresponding depression. Some one must
serve, if some one else is to have leisure to be a noble-
man.

But apart from these tendencies, there is another
economic movement on which we have not yet touched.
In some regions of the world, particularly on the
steppes of Eastern Europe and Asia, the pasture land
provides opportunity for a different form of develop-
ment from the hunting stage. The possession of
flocks and herds is far more free from communal
restrictions than the tilling of the soil ; and even
if the herds are family property, the power of the
father among these peoples is often so great that he
deserves to be called the true owner. But what is
more important, property in flocks and herds can wax
and wane with ease and celerity ; and in pastoral
societies accordingly, the distinction of rich and poor
readily makes its appearance. Some pastoral tribes

1 For serfs of this type among the Germans, see Tacitus, Germania, 25, Schroder,
of. cit. pp. 46, 47.

2 Even a tribe of hunters like the South American Mbaya hold the neighbouring
Guanas in a form of serfdom, compelling them to till land for them.

i THE EVOLUTION OF PROPERTY 19

indeed are slaveholding. In others the poorer members
of the community sufficiently supply the need. 1 The
definite appearance of the man who is neither
provided for as a slave, nor by his own hereditary
share in the common basis of subsistence, seems to be
especially associated with the pastoral stage, and in
agricultural societies to be at least largely influenced
by the pastoral element. It was in the end the en-
closure of the pasture and the waste which destroyed
the remains of the common field system in this country
and achieved the ruin of the small holder. 2

This slight sketch may serve to show the general
character of the economy from which the mediaeval
organization of Western Europe was evolved. The
whole problem of the antecedents of the manor is
still entangled in endless controversy ; but a survey
of the anthropological data on the whole confirms the
view that at the back of the entire process we must
place "a village community of shareholders which
cultivated the land on the open field system and treated
all other requisites of rural life as appendant to it." 3
The only question is as to the extent to which within
this community private property was developed or
eminent control maintained. In any case it is probable
that land was originally held for use, and that its
value to its separate owner was conditioned by the
right which it carried to that part of the area which
was undeniably common. But we have seen that
from the first this system was compatible with in-
equality, and we have noted several methods by which
the inequality might develop. In our own country
in the early Middle Ages the growth of the king's

1 Or there may be a subject tribe who are hewers of wood and drawers of water.
Cf. Nieboer, Slavery as an Industrial System, who finds ten clear cases of the presence
and twelve of the absence of slavery among pastoral folk (p. 262 ff.).

2 See Tawney, Agrarian Problems in the Sixteenth Century j and Hammond, The
Village Labourer.

3 Vinogradoff, Growth of the Manor, p. 365.

20 PROPERTY i

power, and then the grant of judicial privileges and
correlative fiscal duties to private people, together
with corresponding grants to the Church, were con-
tinuously at work to convert the village into the
manor. 1 Now in the manor the cultivators had
certainly to work for the lord as well as for themselves.
The lord's property is held " for power," or perhaps
more strictly it is the economic appanage of the legal
power which he holds over the inhabitants it is
power held for property. At the same time one good
feature of the older system survives. The ordinary
child is still born into a system in which the basis of
his work and his livelihood is assured to him. He
has his virgate or half virgate. At worst if not a
slave 2 he is a cottar with a few acres and the right by
practice, if not by stringent custom, to the pasture and
the waste. Unfortunately these rights were insecure,
and when the strain came, when it became profitable
to lay down pasture, to enclose the demesne, and to
encroach on the waste, there was no one but the free-
holder who was in a firm position for resistance. 3 In
the break-up of the manorial system the serf gained his
freedom, but he lost his land. The outline of the
story has now been pretty clearly made out, but is
too long and complex even for summary here. 4 With
the upshot we are familiar on the one hand
private ownership denuded of the old public obliga-
tions ; on the other, a landless proletariate whose
chief economic privilege is that its members are free
to leave their homes and do better elsewhere ; and
between them the farmer owning his stock but renting
his land.

The appearance of the capitalist farmer is, however,

1 Cf. Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond.

2 Chattel slavery disappeared in England during the twelfth century.

3 On the position of the copyholders and the customary tenants, see Tawney.

4 See the works already cited of Mr. Tawney and Mr. and Mrs. Hammond j
also The English Peasantry and the Enclosures, by Gilbert Slater.

i THE EVOLUTION OF PROPERTY 21

only a minor symptom of a vast change in the nature
of property which has developed pan passu with the
private ownership of land on the large scale. In
early society we could virtually treat land as the one
necessary basis of subsistence ; and the fact that land
could not be accumulated in private hands apart from
personal occupation was noted as a preservative of the
common life. In the pastoral stage, however, we saw
accumulation of a different kind, and the growth of
flocks and herds, the first form of true capital, at once
involved the distinction between the possessing and
non-possessing classes. The development of industry
and commerce has always engendered the same
distinction, and has set a problem to legislators whether
in Athens or in Rome or in our own time. But as
industry is more productive, so accumulation proceeds
on a vastly greater scale in our own civilization ; and
while the borders of political, religious, national, and
one may say social, freedom have widened, the
inequalities of wealth have only increased. Yet it is
not inequality as such that is the fundamental fact of
our system. It is the entire dependence of the masses
on land and capital which belong to others. Five out
of six, I suppose, of the children now born, are born to
no assured place in the industrial system. They have
of their own no means of subsistence. They have
hands and brains, but they have neither land to till nor
stock to till it with. What is more, only a fraction of
our population could be supported by agriculture ;
and for the cotton spinner, the railway man, or the
coal miner, there is no sense in talking of his owning
the means of production as an individual. The rise of
large-scale industry has abolished the possibility of any
form of individualism as a general solution of the
economic problem.

Thus, while modern economic conditions have
virtually abolished property for use apart from

22 PROPERTY i

furniture, clothing, etc. ; that is, property in the means
of production, for the great majority of the people
they have brought about the accumulation of vast
masses of property for power in the hands of a
relatively narrow class. The contrast is accentuated
by the increasing divorce between power and use.
The large landowner stood in some direct governing
relation to his estate. Responsibility went with
ownership, and even survived the explicit association
between land tenure and political functions. The
capitalist employer, who began to be differentiated
from the workman in the earlier part of the modern
period, and who was the prominent feature of the first
two generations of the industrial revolution, was still,
as the name implies, the employer as well as the
capitalist. He himself, that is to say, was actively
engaged in carrying out the function which his
property made possible. But with the progress of
accumulation there came further differentiations. It
became more and more indisputable that the possession
of capital was one thing and the conduct of business
another ; and with the rise of the joint-stock system
capital became so split up into shares and stocks that it
has come to be for its owners nothing more than a
paper certificate, or an entry in the books of the Bank
of England, which they have never seen, meaning to
them only what it brings in by the quarter or the half
year. And yet these investments, this capital, is the
governing force in the lives of thousands and millions
of men scattered throughout the world. It is the
instrument by which they are set in motion, by which
their labour is sustained, above all, by which it is
directed and controlled. The divorce of functions is
complete ; and what wonder if the owner of capital
presents himself to the imagination of the workman
merely as an abstract, distant, unknown suction-pump,
that is drawing away such and such a percentage of the

i THE EVOLUTION OF PROPERTY 23

fruits of industry without making a motion to help in
the work ?

Lastly, behind the mass of the investors, is the
financier who shuffles all these abstract pieces of capital
about, controls their application, takes his commission
on the proceeds, and constitutes himself the working
centre of industry and commerce. The institution of
property has, in its modern form, reached its zenith
as a means of giving to the few power over the life of
the many, and its nadir as a means of securing to
the many the basis of regular industry, purposeful
occupation, freedom, and self-support.

5. SOME THEORIES OF PROPERTY

With these few illustrations of the diversity of
forms which the institution of property has assumed
in the course of social evolution, we may usefully
compare some distinctive theories which have been
held by thinkers of its basis and functions. We may
consider first those who have attacked the institution
of private property altogether, in the interests of
communism ; secondly, those who have found a
general justification for the institution of private
property either in its economic or in its ethical value ;
and thirdly, those who have held that the solution lies
in the discrimination of kinds of property and the
function which each severally performs.

(a) Property has sometimes been attacked on
philosophical, sometimes on religious grounds. In the
Republic , the object of Plato is to set out in clearest
possible outline the picture of a completely unified
State. The State is to be so compact a unity that, if
one of its members suffers, it is to feel that it suffers
in that member, just as when the finger aches the man
feels the ache in the finger. Looking over the rallying
points at which the individual can assert himself

24 PROPERTY i

against the social unity, Plato finds them conspicuously
in family life on the one hand and in property on the
other, and he proceeds to the abolition of both ; at any
rate, the guardians, who are to lead the highest, the
most completely social, and the most fully philosophic
life, can have no room in their minds either for family
or for economic cares. Communism is advocated in
the interests, not of enjoyment but of austerity ; and
in this the Platonic philosophers may be regarded as
prototypes of the monastic community. In both cases
it is open to criticism to maintain that social unity is
pushed to a point at which personality is obliterated,
and that the independence of material things is
expressed in a form in which it defeats itself. Man
cannot live without material things, and in so far as he
is dependent for his necessaries on the will of others,
his life is also dependent upon these others. Where
he cannot move hand or foot without them, he abandons
self-direction, and the self-denial, which was to give
spiritual freedom, ends by denying autonomy altogether.

But the principle of property was also criticized in
antiquity from the point of view of Natural Law.
Property, it was clear to the thinkers who introduced
this conception into ethics, was a human institution.
The gifts of nature, the land and its fruits, must
originally be free to all men ; appropriation was the act
of man, and the institutions by which appropriation is
regulated derived from man-made laws. Just as by
nature all men are free and equal, so by nature they
have a right to use the earth and its fruits for their
own purposes, to apply their labour to them freely,
and to enjoy the product at their will.

This conception of a natural Communism underlying
the institutions of positive law was taken up by the
Early Church, where it fused with the conception of a
Christian Communism, based, not on the Platonic
principle of an abstract unity, but on the ideal of

i THE EVOLUTION OF PROPERTY 25

brotherly love and mutual aid as between co-religionists,
the sons of one Father, the members of one house-
hold. This was an ideal which could only be effective
among the members of a small community ; and when
the Church had seriously to undertake the problem of
reconciling State law with Christian ethics, it had to fall
back on the Stoic distinction between the law of nature
and the positive institutions of government. The
fabric of society was accepted, and though Communism
is proclaimed as the law of nature at the outset of the
Canon law, it is not so interpreted as to direct or
to qualify those institutions of State which determine
the conditions on which property is held, and by which
wealth is distributed, excepting in so far as it secures
the levy of a tax on wealth for the service of the
Church and of the poor. The theory of Communism,
as qualified by respect for established institutions,
becomes a doctrine of charity.

In point of fact, as a political doctrine, Communism
is an emotion rather than a system. In a small
community it has its place. Every family, while the
members live together, is in essence a communistic
unit ; and Communism may be conceived as operating
successfully among any small group of enthusiasts as
long as the enthusiasm is maintained. In the larger
world the communal principle has its place only in
respect of the enjoyment of those things in which no
correlative performance of duty is requisite. Public
spaces, recreation grounds, the advantages of lighting,
and, in some respects, of cleaning, sanitation, order
and good government, are common property in the
strict sense of the term. Everybody can enjoy them
without payment, for some of them are things which
cannot exist at all unless they are available for every
one, and others cost no more when available to all than
they would if restricted to a few. But Communism of
this kind only touches the outside of life.

26 PROPERTY i

() For the regular working of the economic order
it has been clear to most thinkers that there must be
some systematic apportionment of the instruments of
production, and the fruits of industry. The social
organism has many functions, and each function
requires its due stimulus and sustenance ; hence the
most popular theory of property associates it with the
right to labour and the product of labour. On this
basis Locke finds a justification for property antecedent
to positive law. By the law of nature the earth stood
open to all men, but also by the law of nature a man
had the right of property in his own person, and in
that which he wrought with his hands. Accordingly,
that in which he " mixed his labour " became his own,
and this would include the portion of soil which he
reclaimed by occupation and tillage. But in this con-
ception, as Locke apparently recognizes, property is
limited by use : " As much as any one can make use
of to any advantage of life until it spoils, so much he
may by his labour fix, and property in whatever is
beyond this is more than his share, and belongs to
others." Hence Locke protests that his theory is
incompatible with " engrossing." Unfortunately he
only works it out for " Americans," as typical instances
of people who live under conditions where land is
still superabundant. And when he comes to consider
property as an established institution of organized
society, he can only tell us what is painfully obvious,
that " it is plain that the consent of men have agreed
to a disproportionate and unequal possession of the
earth I mean out of the bounds of society and
compact, for in governments the laws regulate it, they
having by consent found out and agreed in a way how
a man may rightfully, and without injury, possess
more than he himself can make use of, by receiving
gold and silver."

1 Second Treatise on Civil Government, chap. v.

i THE EVOLUTION OF PROPERTY 27

Locke, it is true, states in general terms that laws
and government ought to accommodate themselves to
the principles of natural law ; and if we press this
principle in the case of property, it seems clear that
Locke might be led, if he were living now, to some-
what radical conclusions. Be this as it may, we find
in Locke the basis of a view which is at once a
justification of property, and a criticism of industrial
organization. Man has a right, it would seem, first
to the opportunity of labour ; secondly, to the fruits
of his labour ; thirdly, to what he can use of these
fruits, and nothing more. Property so conceived is
what we have here called property for use. The
conception is individualistic, but it may be given a
more social turn if we bear in mind, first of all, that
society as a collective whole is that which determines
the structure and working of economic institutions ;
and secondly, that in a society where men produce
for exchange, labour is a social function, and the price
of labour its reward. Locke's doctrine would then
amount to this, that the social right of each man is
to a place in the economic order, in which he both has
opportunity for exercising his faculties in the social
service, and can reap thereby a reward proportionate
to the value of the service rendered to society. 1

(c) But there exists a much more radical Individual-
ism than Locke's, which also ascends to antiquity.
The Aristotelian criticism of Plato proceeds partly
from the just conception that unity is only one feature
of social life, and that the true community must be
a whole of many diverse parts. It rests also upon
the conception that property is among the external
good things which are necessary to the full expression
of personality. In emphasising this side of the matter 2

1 For some further account of Locke's doctrine and criticism of it see Essay II.,
in which also will be found a fuller account of Aristotle's theory of property than
is needful for the purpose of the next paragraph.

2 Ibid.

28 PROPERTY i

it may be allowed that Aristotle lets the communal
principle evaporate into a mere pious aspiration.
Private possession and common use is a pleasant phrase,
but, we may safely maintain, remains a mere phrase.
It is no organic law for society to lay down, that men
should use their possessions in the spirit of the proverb
that " the things of friends are common."

The centre of this line of thought is the conception
that property is an instrument of personality, and in
that form it has been revived and has played an
important part in modern thought. In general terms,
what has been said at the outset will have justified
this principle by anticipation. Material things that
a man can count upon as his own, that he can leave
and return to, that he can use at his will, are, we have
admitted, the basis of a purposeful life, and therefore
of a rational and harmonious development of personality.
But as a basis of the institution of property this
principle carries with it consequences which seem too
often to be overlooked. On the one hand it carries
the condemnation of a social system in which property
of the kind and amount required for such development
of personality is not generally accessible to all citizens,
who do not forfeit their right by misfeasance. A
society which should accept this principle, could not
tolerate anything like the existing distribution of wealth,
could not permit those methods of accumulation which
concentrate wealth in the hands of the few, and leave
the many so far as the practical object of earning
their living is concerned as naked as they were born.
Cherished as a Conservative principle, it has in it the
seed of Radical revolution. And secondly, if this
principle would require the universal distribution of
the means of subsistence, it would also limit the
accumulation of property by the measure of that which
is healthy for the soul. The possession of property
which emancipates from toil, the possession of property

i THE EVOLUTION OF PROPERTY 29

which makes, not for the guidance of self, but for the
control of others, stands on this principle condemned ;
and what is a justification of property becomes a
reprobation of riches. Ethical individualism in property,
carried through, blows up its own citadel.

(d*) There remains the Socialistic conception of
property, the term by which in general we may express
any theory which distinguishes between the appropria-
tion of the means of production and the appropriation
of the fruits of labour. The difficulty of this theory,
considered merely as a theory for we are not here
concerned with practical applications is, in the first
place, to discriminate neatly between the two kinds of
property ; and in the second place, to determine the
conditions of access for the individual to the means of
production, and the ethical basis and measure of his
reward. But at the outset let us be clear as to the
distinction between the Socialistic principle and the
Communist. To the Communist all things are equally
the objects of enjoyment, without payment made or
service rendered. To the Socialist or indeed to any
society so far as the socialistic principle is applied
property is not common to all, but is held in common
for all, and its assignment or apportionment is a matter
of collective regulation. There is no enjoyment with-
out a correlative performance of function. The problem
before the Socialist has always been to consider how this
collective regulation can be accommodated to the free
initiative and enterprise of the individual ; and it may
be doubted whether, upon purely socialistic principles,
this problem is capable of solution.

The problem is complicated by the psychological
difficulties of democratic organization. We talk easily
of a common property, of a common industry directed
to the common good and organized by the general will ;
but where is the general will ? Is it a figment of the
rhetoricians, or is it a working reality in actual life ?

30 PROPERTY i

In practice, does it mean a collective decision, to which
the ordinary man contributes, and in which therefore
his personality may, in a genuine sense, be said to be
expressed ? Or does it mean the fiat of statesmen and
of experts, sheepishly accepted by the crowd because
they see no way of escaping it ? On the former alter-
native, collective property might truly be regarded as
having that same organic relation to personality as is
possessed by the peasant's plot of ground in relation to
the proprietor, who knows the capacity of every square
yard of it. In the latter alternative, collective industry
becomes a mechanism, in which each man might be
reduced to the part of an unthinking cog, grinding his
grind with no more freedom than the factory hand
under the capitalist employer, and with no more sense
of the social value of his work than the machine-minder
performing a fragmentary process in the manufacture
of an article, which, whether sound or unsound, whole-
some or unwholesome, will go to the use or the
annoyance or the injury of people whom he has never
seen and never will see. Considerations such as these
have led some of the more generous minds of our own
time to look for the reform of property rather in a
revived individualism than in furthering the collectivist
tendencies, which, of late years, have influenced legisla-
tion. Their ideal would be something like the
mediaeval organization, without its restrictions on
personal freedom. They sigh for the day of the small
landed proprietor and the master-workman.

In relation to the land this conception, no doubt,
has a certain limited applicability ; but in the main its
development seems barred by the hard facts of economic
development, making for the large scale of production
and the complex interchange of goods throughout the
world market. Yet the principle is in so far just that
it recognizes an indestructible core of value in the idea
of property. Only it has to be maintained that, if

i THE EVOLUTION OF PROPERTY 31

private property is of value, for reasons and within
limits that have been indicated, to the fulfilment of
personality, common property is equally of value for
the expression and the development of social life. The
problem of modern economic reorganization would
seem to be to find a method, compatible with the
industrial conditions of the new age, of securing to each
man, as a part of his civic birthright, a place in the
industrial system and a lien upon the common product
that he may call his own, without dependence either
upon private charity or the arbitrary decision of an
official.

The other side of this problem is that of securing
for the State the ultimate ownership of the natural
sources of wealth and of the accumulation of past
generations, together with the supreme control of the
direction of industrial activity and of labour contracts.
We cannot reconstitute the early commune. We cannot
secure for each man his inheritance, his virgate, and his
plough team. What we have to aim at would seem to
be an analogous relation between the individual and the
community, adapted to the complexity of modern
conditions, combining the security of the old regime
with the flexibility and freedom of the new, partly by
education and training, partly by the supervision of
industrial organization. We have to restore the con-
tact between the individual and the instruments of
labour. We have to assure him of continuity in
employment, and given reasonable industry and thrift
of provision against the accidents of life and the
periods of helplessness. And for these purposes we
have to restore to society a direct ownership of some
things, but an eminent ownership of all things material
to the production of wealth, securing " property for
use " to the individual, and retaining " property for
power " for the democratic state.

II

THE PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY
OF PROPERTY

BY

THE REV. HASTINGS RASHDALL, D.Lrrr., F.B.A.

FELLOW AND LECTURER IN PHILOSOPHY, NEW COLLEGE, OXFORD
CANON OF HEREFORD

SUMMARY

THE Platonic Utopia has little bearing on modern controversies. Aristotle
understood the advantages of private property, but was not an extreme
Individualist. Defects of his treatment due to (a] his not appreciating the
functions of Capital, (b) not seeing that his condemnation of Usury would
apply to the land-owner. His argument (against Plato) for private property
contains in germ the best that has ever been said on the subject. But his
views presuppose an aristocratic class-morality.

Stoicism and Christianity both contributed to a more universalistic and
humanitarian morality. Views of the Fathers, Canonists, and Jurists. The
legal idea that property can be acquired by occupatio passes into an ethical
justification of property.

Locke's attempt to base property upon natural law by assuming that a
man has a natural right to his own labour and to everything (including
land) with which he mixes his labour. Difficulties and inconsistencies of
the theory, which contradicts itself, since its application would violate the
natural right of the landless man to his labour. This seen by Karl Marx
and the a priori Socialists, who made the same principle the basis of extreme
Socialism, i.e. the principle that a man is entitled to the whole produce of
his labour. The theory cannot be applied in practice.

Impossible to settle the question by any a priori theory. Duties and
rights cannot be ascertained without an appeal to social consequences. This
recognized by Hume and the Utilitarians.

Many later thinkers would accept the view that property can only be
justified by its tendency to promote the public good without admitting that
" good " means only pleasure.

Locke's principle on the whole followed by Kant.

Kant's influence produced a tendency in Idealists generally to treat the
rights of property as natural rights, e.g. in Hegel ; but Hegel's influence
valuable (a) in promoting a more spiritual view of the State and its functions,
(b) in emphasising the influence of property upon character its necessity as
an expression of personality.

The extreme Individualism of Herbert Spencer based on same principle
as Locke's, aided by a misapplication of the Darwinian doctrine of the
" struggle for existence." He failed to see that private property implies as
much State interference as Socialism.

The influence of Hegel on T. H. Green and other English Idealists.

The general tendency of modern political thought is to base the
justification and the limitation of property-rights upon their social effects,
including moral effects.

Bosanquet's insistence upon the necessity of private property for the
development of character : a man's future must depend upon his own
efforts and foresight.

Value of the principle admitted as also the importance of liberty for
social development, even if this liberty can only be fully enjoyed by the few.

Criticism of Professor Bosanquet : (a) he seems to forget that Socialism
does not condemn private property but only private capital ; (b) he too
readily assumes that private property must always imply the present rights
of inheritance and capitalisation ; (c) while rightly insisting on the good
effects of property upon character, he ignores the intense selfishness promoted
by the present system of almost unlimited competition.

The problem of the future is gradually to modify the institution so as to
secure its good effects, economic and moral, without its injustices and
other bad effects. The whole question must be solved by an appeal to the
social effects of different systems, not by any a priori principle.

II

THE PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY
OF PROPERTY

A HISTORICAL SURVEY AND CRITICISM

IT will be impossible in a short article to dwell on the
earlier history of speculation on this subject. Plato's
drastic treatment of the institution must be passed over
altogether ; and after all, the Platonic Utopia has little
bearing on modern controversies, for it was apparently
only for a particular class that his Communism was
designed. It would be more to the point to dwell
upon the theories of Aristotle ; for there is much in
his treatment of the subject which is of the highest
significance for the modern world. Nobody understood
better the advantages of private property as an institu-
tion ; and yet he was far indeed from the position of
modern Individualists. His fundamental thought was
that property was an instrument of life of the highest
life ; and he recognized that not an unlimited but a
limited amount of property was necessary for such
a life. For him the ideal arrangement was that half
the land of the state should be held in common and
only half held by private owners, and he thought it
desirable that in the original distribution of wealth
extreme inequalities should be avoided ; but he was far
too keenly alive to the dangers of Revolution

35

36 PROPERTY n

that ever-present peril in the ancient City-state to
favour a compulsory expropriation of existing owners.
His objection to lending money upon interest does
perhaps imply some suspicion of the moral difficulties
connected with it : but he had no conception at all of
the true functions of capital, and so fell into the
economic fallacy so familiar to us from the speech of
Antonio in the Merchant of Venice^ that usury is
wrong because " barren metal " does not breed. It
never occurred to him that, though money does not
breed, it will buy a cow which does breed. If A
borrowed from B 20 for a year, and bought therewith
a cow, and then proposed to hand B back the cow (or
the 20 which it cost) and keep the calf, the absurdity
would be evident. Nor did he recognize that, if all
lending upon interest is to be condemned, the con-
demnation would fall as much upon the aristocratic
land-owning citizen the type with him of all that was
excellent and respectable as well as upon the despised
alien money-lender. In fact Aristotle was far too much
imbued with the prejudices of the aristocratic class to
be capable of discussing the subject in any fundamental
manner. The ethical question as to the justification of
private property and private capital (he, of course, does
not distinguish between them) is never fairly raised.
So far as the problem is raised and answered, the
answer amounts to this : That material wealth is
necessary as a condition of the higher life ; and that
some measure of private property is more conducive to
the higher life than any form of common ownership,
because (i) it tends more to real unity of sentiment
(the raison d^etre of the Platonic Utopia) than Com-
munism ; (2) it is economically superior to it, for
people bestow more attention upon the management of
private than of public property ; (3) ownership is a
source of pleasure ; and (4) it is more conducive to
the growth of character, for Communism destroys the

ii THE PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY 37

possibility of exercising two important virtues, self-
control and liberality. 1 It is not too much to say that we
have here an outline of the best that has ever been said
in defence of private property ; but the difficulties of the
subject are not appreciated. Aristotle's intensely aristo-
cratic moral theory, according to which virtue was only
possible to gentlemen of education and "private means,"
while the slave and even the free artisan (if he was not
a citizen) were mere means to virtue or noble life in
another, prevented his arriving at any fully thought
out theory which could be acceptable to those who
have rejected his narrow civic and class morality.

Both Stoicism and Christianity contributed to the
establishment of a more universalistic and more humani-
tarian ideal of life. And there is much in the teaching
of the Christian Fathers, as well as of the Stoic
Philosophers and of the great Roman Jurists (the
earlier of whom were powerfully affected by Stoic ideas,
arid the later also by Christianity), which would be
well worth examining if space allowed (see below,
Essays IV.-V.). Within our limits it is only possible to
remark that the Christian teachers were for the most
part occupied merely with the question of private
ethics, not of State regulation : in so far therefore as
they felt scruples about the justification of large private
wealth, the moral drawn was simply an inculcation of
almsgiving. So far as there is any definite ethical
theory of property, the general tendency is to admit
that originally, and therefore " naturally," all things
were common, but that private property is necessitated
by that corruption of human nature which was brought
about by the Fall. Still, in so far as the actual state of
human nature required such a private appropriation of
goods, this very necessity constitutes a certain justifica-
tion for it. So far the tendency was to treat the laws
of property as a branch of positive law, and to find the

1 Aristotle, Politic^ ii. pp. 1261 15-1263 b.

38 PROPERTY n

justification for them in the same considerations which
justified the State in general. 1 During the Middle
Ages the question of the right and justification of the
State's authority was a matter of lively controversy.
The Decretum of Gratian the famous text-book of
Canon Law which appeared about 1142 finds the
origin and justification of the State in a supposed
original contract ; and though it had to contend with
other theories, the tendency during the latter portion
of this period was towards a general acceptance of the
theory which found the justification of the State in
a contract or agreement, the duty to observe which
belonged to natural law and was itself independent of
State enactment. It was implied in this theory that all
property rights must be derived from the authority
of the State, and must therefore be liable in the last
resort to be overruled for the public good by that
authority. At the same time the absoluteness of the
power which this view seemed to give to the State-
that is, practically in most cases to a monarch who was
becoming more and more despotic made the defenders
of law and public right unwilling to acquiesce in a
view which placed all property at the mercy of the
ruler, and anxious to find a basis for their rights in the
requirements of natural law. This was done by what
we may call an ethical application of the purely legal
theories about occupatio. The Jurist as such was not
concerned with the strictly ethical question, but he was
concerned with the question how and when private
property was to be recognized, how it was to be
distinguished from that which was not property at all
or which was in some sense common property in fact

1 For further information as to patristic and mediaeval views about property, see
Essay V. j also Carlyle, History of Mediaeval Political Theory in the West, I. chap, xii.,
II. chap, ii., etc. ; Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Age, ed. Maitland, pp.
78 5^., 178 sq. et passim. It must be remembered that the ancient and mediaeval
thinkers were largely prevented from taking a strong view of the naturalness or
sacredness of property by the fact that for them property included slaves. The
tendency was therefore to rest its justification solely upon the authority of the State.

ii THE PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY 39

what constituted a valid title to property : and this
question was one which to some extent involved the
historical question as to the origin of private property.
Now it was a simple matter of historical fact that one
at least of the ways in which private property began
was by some person or persons "occupying" or
appropriating to his or their own use something which
previously was unappropriated (res nullius] ; and the
Roman Law recognizes such occupatio as a valid title to
property. So far the theory was merely legal and
historical ; but it was an easy step to find in this
historical fact an ethical justification of the institution.
This occupatio was morally justified by the theory
that the appropriation involved labour, and that this
labour gave the appropriating individual a right to the
fruits of his labour, in accordance with the provisions
of natural law. That a man who takes the trouble
to cut down a tree in a wild and unappropriated forest
and make a canoe of it should be allowed to keep the
canoe and reserve it for his exclusive use, is indeed so
natural and convenient an arrangement that it has been
recognized by most primitive peoples and savage tribes.
This recognition is not, we are told, universal ; in some
primitive communities the tribal instinct is so strong,
and the recognition of the individual's claims so weak,
that there would not be the smallest notion that the
making of a canoe gave a man any title to prevent his
fellow tribesmen using it on the following morning.
Still, on the whole, private ownership in things actually
and obviously created by labour is a fairly primitive
and fairly universal human institution. And it was
natural enough to extend the same mode of thinking
to the case of cultivated land, though the more
careful study of primitive history has taught us that as
a rule the first appropriation and cultivation of land
was the work of groups rather than of individuals. It
was tempting to the philosopher in search of a theoretical

40 PROPERTY n

justification of property to accept this natural instinct
of appropriation, and the legal notions which had
grown out of it, as an ultimate solution of his difficulties
and not to go behind it. Sometimes the justification
was eked out either by utilitarian considerations or by
the theory of a general consent, given either directly
to the principle that occupation or labour constitutes
ownership, or indirectly as a corollary of the general
agreement that the State which has sanctioned this
arrangement is to be obeyed.

I shall not attempt to follow the growth of these
ideas through the Fathers, the Jurists, the Canonists, the
Schoolmen, the modern juristic thinkers like Grotius,
or the earlier modern Philosophers. The subject is
not prominent in the earliest modern Philosophers,
except quite incidentally as a department of Ethics.
Speaking very broadly, the general tendency was to
defend the institution of private property and the
prohibition of theft on utilitarian grounds, as conducive
to the good of human society, whether that good was
made to consist in mere pleasure (as with Hobbes) or
in some higher kind of Well-being. I will pass
immediately to the writings of Locke, whose version
of the theory already touched upon the natural right
to the fruits of one's labour has become the basis of
almost all the attempts of modern philosophers to
base the justification of private property upon some
a priori principle, and not upon the ground of general
utility and convenience.

Strictly speaking Locke was himself a pure Utilitarian.
In his Essay he strenuously denies the existence of
any " innate practical principles," and occasionally in
his Treatise of Civil Government he attempts to defend
the doctrine that labour confers ownership on utilitarian
grounds as a means to the general good ; but in
general, when dealing with this subject as indeed in
his political speculation generally he entirely forgets

ii THE PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY 41

his utilitarian principles, and treats the theory as if
it were indeed an "innate practical principle." The
explanation of this curious lapse is to be found in the
circumstances of his time. There was a general agree-
ment among the thinkers too enlightened to accept
the High Anglican divine right of Kings, that the
authority of Government must be found in a supposed
original contract. Primitive men had elected a
Sovereign and agreed to obey him, and there is a tacit
agreement of living men to go on obeying the State.
The chief subject of dispute was as to the limits of the
authority thus conferred. Hobbes, as a champion of
Absolutism in the State that is to say, as regards
England, of absolute Monarchy treated that authority
as practically unlimited. 1 Locke as a Whig was interested
in setting limits to it. In particular he endeavoured
to turn the familiar Whig doctrine " No taxation
without representation " from an accepted maxim of
the English constitution, or a convenient understanding
for any developed political community, into an absolute
ethical principle. He admitted that Monarchy might
be a lawful form of government when established by
general agreement. In such a government a King
might make laws and issue orders, and it was the duty
of the subject to obey them, but there was one
thing which the most absolute monarch in the world
could not lawfully do : he could not take a sixpence
out of his subject's pockets without his express consent
given personally or by representation. The King
could make laws under which the subject could be
shot ; he could enter upon a war and compel him
to fight in it and be shot by the enemy ; he could
interfere with his liberty and convenience in a thousand
ways without any consent except the assumed con-
sent to enter into political society ; but no original

1 See the early chapters of his Leviathan. The theory had been already adopted
by Hooker in the first chapter of his Ecclesiastical Polity.

42 PROPERTY ii

consent or consideration of social advantage, however
pressing, could overcome the inherent sacredness of
the breeches pocket. To maintain this theory it was
necessary to represent that the institution of private
property did not depend simply upon any laws made
by the Sovereign, but was part of the law of nature,
and as such existed already in the supposed state of
nature prior to the institution of civil society. It
rested upon the law of nature.

Hobbes had represented the state of nature as one
in which there was absolutely no law and no morality,
no duties and no rights. Every man could do what
he liked and take what he liked checked only by the
equally comprehensive right of every one else to do
the same. Only when men had entered into a contract
to obey a common superior did any rights or obliga-
tions arise. Not so with Locke. According to him
individuals in a state of nature had certain rights and
certain corresponding duties, discernible by the light
of nature and prescribed by its laws. Among these
" laws of nature," or self-evident moral principles, was
this : that every man has a right to his own person, to
his own labour, and to that with which he mixes his
labour.

"Though the earth, and all inferiour creatures, be common
to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person : this
nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of his body,
and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his.
Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath
provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and
joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it
his property. It being by him removed from the common
state nature hath placed it in, hath by this labour something
annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other men.
For this labour Kefng the unquestionable property of the
labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once
joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good, left in
common for others.

II

THE PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY 43

" He that is nourished by the acorns he picked up under a
oak, or the apples he gathered from the trees in the wood, has
certainly appropriated them to himself. Nobody can deny
but the nourishment is his. I ask then, when did they begin
to be his ? when he digested ? or when he eat ? or when he
boiled ? or when he brought them home ? or when he picked
them up ? and it is plain, if the first gathering made them not
his, nothing else could. That labour put a distinction between
them and common ; that added something to them more than
nature, the common mother of all, had done ; and so they
became his private right. And will any one say he had no
right to those acorns or apples he thus appropriated, because
he had not the consent of all mankind to make them his ? was
it a robbery thus to assume to himself what belonged to all in
common ? If such a consent as that was necessary, man had
starved, notwithstanding the plenty God had given him." 1

Private property in land can be acquired in the
same way by mixing one's labour with it though in
a state of nature these rights are qualified by certain
important reservations. In the first place, a man may
only appropriate as much wealth as he can use. " The
same law of nature that does by this means give us
property, does also bound that property too. c God
has given us all thing richly' (i Tim. vi. 12). Is
the voice of reason confirmed by inspiration ? But
how has He given it us ? c To enjoy/ As much as any
one can make use of to any advantage of life before it
spoils, so much he may by his labour fix a property in.
Whatever is beyond this is more than his share, and
belongs to others." 2 Thus if a man plucks apples and
heaps them up beneath the tree, his labour in plucking
them gives him a right to appropriate them. The
next wayfarer coming along must starve rather than
touch them ; but if the plucker lets any of the apples
perish uneaten, he is a thief. This restriction is
meant no doubt to apply to the case of land as of other
property. But in the case of land in particular a very

1 Treatise of Civil Government, chap. v. 27, 28.
2 Ibid. 31.

44 PROPERTY n

significant restriction is (as we have seen) introduced,
though in a hesitating manner " at least where there is
as much and as good left for others." Private property
in land may have been justified on these principles " in
the beginning " or when " all the world was America " ;
but it is difficult to see how he .could have thought that
it justified private property as it existed in England at
the end of the seventeenth century.

What shall we say to this theory ? Is it self-
evident that a man has a right to all that his labour
produces ? Rights are meaningless except as the
converse of duties. To say that a man has a right to
all that his labour produces, means that other people
are under a moral obligation to let him enjoy all that
his labour produces. Is it self-evident that they ought
to do this, even if the consequences to Society should
be disastrous ? Was a party of primitive men if we
presuppose Locke's unhistorical conception of primitive
life wandering over an unappropriated prairie, morally
bound to allow an individual who had got a few miles
beyond them to appropriate all the available apples or
acorns or dates? Ought they to starve rather than
interfere with his hoard, until it was proved by ex-
perience that he had appropriated more than he could
consume ? And then, if we concede the right to what
the labour produces, what about the material with
which he chooses to " mix his labour " ? Labour
produces nothing without some material, which is
always in the last resort some part of the soil or of the
things that grow out of it. May a man mix ever so
little labour with ever so much raw material, and yet
secure a right over that material for himself and his
heirs for all time ? May he by merely constructing a
ring-fence round some thousand acres of the best soil,
or perhaps lightly scratching its surface with a plough,
secure that property to himself, his heirs, and assigns
for ever ? If we concede that his labour gives him the

ii THE PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY 45

property in it for his lifetime, what about his heirs
who have not laboured upon it? Is there any self-
evident principle which determines what is to become of
it after his death ? Locke assumes that the English
liberty of bequest (not altogether unlimited in Locke's
time) was the "natural" arrangement. Yet a will of
lands was only made possible by a statute of Henry
VIII. ; and in case of intestacy three separate systems of
distribution prevailed (and still prevail) even within the
limits of England. In the greater part of the country
the whole of the real estate goes to the eldest son ; in
certain parts of the county of Kent it is equally divided
in accordance with the custom of Gavelkind ; while
in other parts of the country it all goes to the youngest
son, in accordance with the custom of Borough English.
Are all these arrangements in accordance with the law of
nature ? Locke would probably have urged that these
were modifications of the law of nature introduced by
the State-made or civil law, which derived its authority
from the social contract. But it is not apparent how
the contract, the obligation to keep which itself rests
upon a principle of natural law, can override other
laws of nature which are (according to Locke) as sacred
and absolute as the law that contracts shall be kept.
And after all the law of nature only conferred a
limited right of property. What has become of the
limitations which restricted property to as much as a
man could use and no more, and qualified even this
principle as regards land by the " at least when there is
as much and as good left for others " ?

The best way of criticizing Locke's theory is to j
show that, when thought out, it contradicts itself.
Let us suppose that ten men appropriate a desert
island, divide it among themselves, and cultivate their
respective shares. Each of them has ten sons, and
having a taste for " founding a family " leaves his share
to the eldest. In the next generation there will be ten

46 PROPERTY ii

landlords and ninety landless men. These men have
a sacred, natural right to the fruits of their labour :
but how are they to exercise it ? They will say to
the elder brothers : " We have a right to labour :
let us work on your lands." " By all means," the
elder brothers will say, " on condition of paying over
to us all that the land produces over and above what
will keep you and your families." In that way the
principle contradicts itself. The rights of property,
supposed to be derived from a man's natural right to
the fruits of his labour, involves the negation of that
right in the non-inheritors of property. This is exactly
what Karl Marx and the a priori Socialists saw. They
accepted Locke's own principle, and expressed it in
the only logical form " the labourer has a right to
the whole produce of his labour." But this right is
defeated by any private appropriation of land and
capital ; therefore all land and capital, all the " instru-
ments of production," must be held in common.
Thus the same principle which was intended by Locke
as the basis of a system of extreme Individualism, has
become the corner-stone of a system of extreme and
thorough - going Socialism. Upon the premisses it
cannot be denied that the socialistic application- is the
more logical. And yet in one way the socialistic
application is open to the same fundamental objection
as Locke's. It might possibly be applied to a very
primitive society in which each individual, or rather
each family, produced by their own unassisted efforts
everything that they wanted. But in a piece of cloth
woven in a modern factory, who shall say how much
of the finished product was really due to the weaver,
how much to his assistant, how much to the shepherd
who tended the sheep, how much to the merchant
who brought it to market ? And then the soldier,
the magistrate, the policeman, the schoolmaster, the
builder, who all indirectly took part in its production,

ii THE PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY 47

will reasonably contend that they too assisted to make
that piece of cloth, and will demand their shares. But
the maxim gives us no guidance as to the principle
upon which the resulting wealth is to be divided
between all these classes of labourers without all sorts
of supplementary principles, about the justice or
reasonableness of which endless disputes arise. And
then after all, as Locke saw, the appropriation of
Capital by the State only settles difficulties of dis-
tribution so long as " there is as much and as good
left for others." The Karl Marx theory may justify
the appropriation of land as between the members of
a particular section inter se ; but it assumes the appro-
priation of the whole country by a particular community,
and this cannot be justified as against the inhabitants
of less favoured regions, if labour alone can confer a
title to the enjoyment of wealth. Nobody has created
the soil with which the man has mixed his labour.
The fundamental question which Locke's theory raises
is, whether any principle for the regulation of property
or the enjoyment of wealth can claim to be self-evident
apart from all considerations of social effects.

It cannot be too strongly insisted that the question
of property is only a particular department of the more
general question, whether there are any a priori self-
evident rights ; and that in turn depends upon the
question whether there are any duties which can be
laid down a priori^ and without reference to the
social effects of conduct. Rights are meaningless apart
from duties ; if all duties spring in the last resort from
the duty of promoting the general good, then rights
must also be shown to spring from the same principle.
This was seen by Hume, who is generally regarded as
the founder of modern Utilitarianism, the system
according to which all duty consists in promoting
the general good interpreted to mean nothing but
happiness in the sense of pleasure. The system was

48 PROPERTY

ii

really much older than Hume. But Hume did much
more than his predecessors in attempting to apply the
principle to the details of duty ; and he made a much
more systematic attempt than they to meet some of
its obvious difficulties. One of the most conspicuous
of these was connected with the question of property.
If an act is always right which produces a maximum
of happiness, how could any act be more justifiable
than to pick the pocket of a Duke, who would not
feel the loss, and to give the proceeds to a beggar to
whom it would give much pleasure ? Hume met this
difficulty by the great utilitarian principle of the general
rule or the long-run. Many isolated acts might
produce happiness, which would be socially disastrous
if generally imitated.

To make this (the principle that the idea Justice is based upon
Utility in an indirect and artificial way) more evident consider,
that, tho' the rules of justice are establish'd merely by interest,
their connexion with interest is somewhat singular, and is
different from what may be observed on other occasions. A
single act of justice is frequently contrary to public interest ;
and were it to stand alone, without being followed by other
tacts, may, in itself, be very prejudicial to society. When a
man of merit, of a beneficent disposition, restores a great
fortune to a miser, or a seditious bigot, he has acted justly and
laudably, but the public is a real sufferer. Nor is every single
act of justice, consider'd apart, more conducive to private
interest than to public ; and 'tis easily conceiv'd how a man
may impoverish himself by a signal instance of integrity, and
have reason to wish, that with regard to that single act, the
laws of justice were for a moment suspended in the universe.
But however single acts of justice may be contrary, either to
public or private interest, 'tis certain, that the whole plan or
scheme is highly conducive, or indeed absolutely requisite,
both to the support of society, and the well-being of every
individual. 'Tis impossible to separate the good from the ill.
Property must be stable, and must be fix'd by general rules.
Tho' in one instance the public be a sufferer, this momentary
ill is amply compensated by the steady prosecution of the rule,
and by the power and order, which it establishes in society.

ii THE PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY 49

And now every individual person must find himself a gainer,
on ballancing the account ; since without justice society must
immediately dissolve, and every one must fall into that savage
and solitary condition, which is infinitely worse than the worst
situation that can possibly be suppos'd in society. 1

From Hume the Utilitarian principle passed to
Jeremy Bentham and his followers, the first school
who were actually called Utilitarians. Hume himself
was a man of very conservative views, and little social
or humanitarian enthusiasm. The application which
he gave to his doctrine of property was eminently
conservative; the rights, practically the unlimited
rights, of property had no more ardent champion than
this sceptical and very destructive thinker. Bentham
was, of course, a zealous social reformer ; and would
heartily have favoured any attempt to modify the
actual legal rights of property in any way which
would tend to promote the public happiness. But
the Benthamites were not Socialists. They were, most
of them, ardent champions of a Psychology which
regards the individual's love of his own pleasure as the
supreme motive in human conduct, and of a Political
Economy which was based upon that psychology, and
which was consequently disposed to defend the system
of private capital, with the inducements which it offers
for individual exertion and accumulation, as absolutely
essential to the public good. With the economic theory
we are not now concerned. It is enough to point out
that according to the Utilitarian school the rights of
property spring ultimately from their tendency to
promote the public good. This is a principle in
which both the most ardent Individualist and the
most extreme Socialist may agree. And there has
been, on the whole, a general (though of course not by
any means a universal) disposition ever since the time
of Bentham to argue the question of property upon

1 Treatise of Human Nature, Pt. ii. 2.

50 PROPERTY n

this basis upon the question of its social effects.
Karl Marx, indeed, based his Socialism upon an
a priori principle ; but of late the controversy between
Socialism and its critics has generally been conducted
on the assumption that the Utilitarian criterion is to
be accepted. The question has been simply which
system has the greatest tendency to ' promote the
public good. The principle of Utility is practically
assumed in discussing questions of politics or public
policy by many who would (however inconsistently)
refuse to apply it to the details of private morals ;
and it has been even more universally accepted in
popular controversy than among professed philosophers.
The most important qualification of the Utilitarian
principle which has been introduced among philosophers
is that most of them refuse to accept the view that the
good is identical with pleasure. Many of those who
would agree with Bentham in making the justification
and the limitation of property-rights (as of all other prin-
ciples of conduct) depend upon their tendency to pro-
mote the Well-being of human society, decline to follow
him in thinking that Well-being means simply pleasure,
and that pleasures differ only in quantity, not in quality.
They will agree with Bentham as to the impossibility of
pronouncing upon the morality of any human act apart
from its consequences ; they will differ from him as to
the character of the consequences which have to be
taken into consideration. They will admit that what
appear at first sight self-evident moral rules are found
on a little reflection to contradict themselves, to involve
exceptions really based on considerations of social well-
being, and to be really incapable of being laid down
with any definiteness or precision without reference
to such considerations. They will contend that we do
not really understand what an act is until we understand
its consequences, so far as these can be foreseen : and
if consideration of consequences is once admitted, it is

ii THE PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY 51

arbitrary to stop at any particular point. Ideally, an
act is right which tends to promote the largest possible
amount of true human Well-being. 1 If so, the duties
which the institution of property imposes must be de-
fended on exactly the same principle by their tendency
ultimately (with immense stress on the ultimately) to
promote this end. But it does not follow that true
human Good or Well-being consists solely in a greatest
quantum of pleasure. Many of those who would
agree with Bentham in appealing to consequences,
would insist strongly that morality or character or the
good will is an end in itself and the most important
element of Good ; that intellectual and aesthetic activity
are likewise valuable in themselves and not merely on
account of the pleasure which they produce ; and that,
though pleasure is certainly an element in Well-being,
its value depends upon its kind or quality and not
merely upon quantity. Further to develop this view
or the history of the controversies connected with it
belongs to moral rather than to political philosophy.
I can only point out that the question of property is
part of a wider ethical problem ; and that if we accept
a consequential or " teleological " theory of Ethics, we
are bound to make the justification of property depend
upon the same principle. But I must now return for
a moment to the a priori theories held by those who
refuse to accept the teleological theory, 2 whether in its
hedonistic or its unhedonistic form.

For the most part the modern attempts to place the
rights of property upon an a priori basis have followed
very much the lines laid down by Locke. Kant, who
introduced such a " Copernican revolution " in Meta-

1 I have developed the ethical theory here presupposed in my Theory of Good
and Evil, and more briefly in a little volume on Ethics in " The People's Books "
Series. This view may conveniently be styled " Ideal Utilitarianism."

2 I.e. a theory which finds the test of the morality of an act in the end which
it promotes : the term " Utilitarianism," when used without explanation or qualifica-
tion, is generally used to imply that this end is maximum pleasure.

52 PROPERTY ii

physics, was the author of no new principle in politics.
He accepted the social-contract view as to the origin
and authority of the State in its crudest and most
individualistic form, and he based property, like Locke,
on what we may call the divine right of grab. The
first occupier acquired thereby a sacred right to the
ownership of it for all eternity. He introduced a
qualification of the theory which brings out with
peculiar distinctness its wholly unethical character.
He held that a man has only a right to so much
property as he can defend, and on this basis attempted
to place on an a priori footing the convenient but
arbitrary rule of international law which makes the
dominion of States extend three miles into the sea,
this being in Kant's time the maximum range of
artillery. 1 What Natural Law will have to say when
the guns on both sides of the English Channel can
equally sweep the middle of the intervening waters is
a problem which he has naturally not discussed. In
Kant, however, the theory as to the way in which
property could be acquired in a state of nature was
seriously modified in its application to organized civil
society. In civil society property can only be acquired
by the implicit consent of Society, to which the State
itself owes its authority. And the proper limits to the
State's authority are fixed by the principle that the
State's duty is to exercise the minimum of restraint
under which the maximum liberty of each shall be
compatible with the maximum liberty of every other.
By a maximum of liberty he did not mean any of the
subtler ethical ideas which have been read into the
phrase by later Idealists who have used the same
language, but simply freedom from constraint. It
would be impossible further to develop Kant's view
of property without discussing his whole conception
of the nature of the State and of human society. It

1 Kant's Philosophy of Law, Eng. trans, by Hastie, pp. 82-92, etc.

ii THE PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY 53

will be sufficient to say that the influence of Kant has
produced a disposition among idealistic Philosophers
to regard the rights of