duties, desiring peace, but unable to "seek peace and ensue it,"
because unwilling to surrender the creed which is the cause of war, to
what can one compare such a society but to the international world,
which also has been called a society and which also is social in
nothing but name? And the comparison is more than a play upon words.
It is an analogy which has its roots in the facts of history. It is
not a chance that the last two centuries, which saw the new growth of a
new system of industry, saw also the growth of the system of
international politics which came to a climax in the period from 1870
to 1914. Both the one and the other are the expression of the same
spirit and move in obedience to similar laws. The essence of the
former was the repudiation of any authority superior to the individual
reason. It left men free to follow their own interests or ambitions or
appetites, untrammeled by subordination to any common center of
allegiance. The essence of the latter was the repudiation of any
authority superior to the sovereign state, which again was conceived as
a compact self-contained unit--a unit {48} which would lose its very
essence if it lost its independence of other states. Just as the one
emancipated economic activity from a mesh of antiquated traditions, so
the other emancipated nations from arbitrary subordination to alien
races or Governments, and turned them into nationalities with a right
to work out their own destiny.
Nationalism is, in fact, the counterpart among nations of what
individualism is within them. It has similar origins and tendencies,
similar triumphs and defects. For nationalism, like individualism,
lays its emphasis on the rights of separate units, not on their
subordination to common obligations, though its units are races or
nations, not individual men. Like individualism it appeals to the
self-assertive instincts, to which it promises opportunities of
unlimited expansion. Like individualism it is a force of immense
explosive power, the just claims of which must be conceded before it is
possible to invoke any alternative principle to control its operations.
For one cannot impose a supernational authority upon irritated or
discontented or oppressed nationalities any more than one can
subordinate economic motives to the control of society, until society
has recognized that there is a sphere which they may legitimately
occupy. And, like individualism, if pushed to its logical conclusion,
it is self-destructive. For as nationalism, in its brilliant youth,
begins as a claim that nations, because they are spiritual beings,
shall determine themselves, and passes too often into a claim that they
shall dominate others, so individualism begins by asserting the right
of men to {49} make of their own lives what they can, and ends by
condoning the subjection of the majority of men to the few whom good
fortune or special opportunity or privilege have enabled most
successfully to use their rights. They rose together. It is probable
that, if ever they decline, they will decline together. For life
cannot be cut in compartments. In the long run the world reaps in war
what it sows in peace. And to expect that international rivalry can be
exorcised as long as the industrial order within each nation is such as
to give success to those whose existence is a struggle for
self-aggrandizement is a dream which has not even the merit of being
beautiful.
So the perversion of nationalism is imperialism, as the perversion of
individualism is industrialism. And the perversion comes, not through
any flaw or vice in human nature, but by the force of the idea, because
the principle is defective and reveals its defects as it reveals its
power. For it asserts that the rights of nations and individuals are
absolute, which is false, instead of asserting that they are absolute
in their own sphere, but that their sphere itself is contingent upon
the part which they play in the community of nations and individuals,
which is true. Thus it constrains them to a career of indefinite
expansion, in which they devour continents and oceans, law, morality
and religion, and last of all their own souls, in an attempt to attain
infinity by the addition to themselves of all that is finite. In the
meantime their rivals, and their subjects, and they themselves are
conscious of the danger of opposing forces, and seek to {50} purchase
security and to avoid a collision by organizing a balance of power.
But the balance, whether in international politics or in industry, is
unstable, because it reposes not on the common recognition of a
principle by which the claims of nations and individuals are limited,
but on an attempt to find an equipoise which may avoid a conflict
without adjuring the assertion of unlimited claims. No such equipoise
can be found, because, in a world where the possibilities of increasing
military or industrial power are illimitable, no such equipoise can
exist.
Thus, as long as men move on this plane, there is no solution. They
can obtain peace only by surrendering the claim to the unfettered
exercise of their rights, which is the cause of war. What we have been
witnessing, in short, during the past five years, both in international
affairs and in industry, is the breakdown of the organization of
society on the basis of rights divorced from obligations. Sooner or
later the collapse was inevitable, because the basis was too narrow.
For a right is simply a power which is secured by legal sanctions, "a
capacity," as the lawyers define it, "residing in one man, of
controlling, with the assistance of the State, the action of others,"
and a right should not be absolute for the same reason that a power
should not be absolute. No doubt it is better that individuals should
have absolute rights than that the State or the Government should have
them; and it was the reaction against the abuses of absolute power by
the State which led in the eighteenth century to the declaration of the
absolute rights of individuals. {51} The most obvious defense against
the assertion of one extreme was the assertion of the other. Because
Governments and the relics of feudalism had encroached upon the
property of individuals it was affirmed that the right of property was
absolute; because they had strangled enterprise, it was affirmed that
every man had a natural right to conduct his business as he pleased.
But, in reality, both the one assertion and the other are false, and,
if applied to practice, must lead to disaster. The State has no
absolute rights; they are limited by its commission. The individual
has no absolute rights; they are relative to the function which he
performs in the community of which he is a member, because, unless they
are so limited, the consequences must be something in the nature of
private war. All rights, in short, are conditional and derivative,
because all power should be conditional and derivative. They are
derived from the end or purpose of the society in which they exist.
They are conditional on being used to contribute to the attainment of
that end, not to thwart it. And this means in practice that, if
society is to be healthy, men must regard themselves not as the owners
of rights, but as trustees for the discharge of functions and the
instruments of a social purpose.
{52}
V
PROPERTY AND CREATIVE WORK
The application of the principle that society should be organized upon
the basis of functions, is not recondite, but simple and direct. It
offers in the first place, a standard for discriminating between those
types of private property which are legitimate and those which are not.
During the last century and a half, political thought has oscillated
between two conceptions of property, both of which, in their different
ways, are extravagant. On the one hand, the practical foundation of
social organization has been the doctrine that the particular forms of
private property which exist at any moment are a thing sacred and
inviolable, that anything may properly become the object of property
rights, and that, when it does, the title to it is absolute and
unconditioned. The modern industrial system took shape in an age when
this theory of property was triumphant. The American Constitution and
the French Declaration of the Rights of Man both treated property as
one of the fundamental rights which Governments exist to protect. The
English Revolution of 1688, undogmatic and reticent though it was, had
in effect done the same. The great individualists from Locke to
Turgot, Adam Smith and Bentham all repeated, in different language, a
similar conception. Though what gave the Revolution its {53}
diabolical character in the eyes of the English upper classes was its
treatment of property, the dogma of the sanctity of private property
was maintained as tenaciously by French Jacobins as by English Tories;
and the theory that property is an absolute, which is held by many
modern Conservatives, is identical, if only they knew it, with that not
only of the men of 1789, but of the Convention itself.
On the other hand, the attack has been almost as undiscriminating as
the defense. "Private property" has been the central position against
which the social movement of the last hundred years has directed its
forces. The criticism of it has ranged from an imaginative communism
in the most elementary and personal of necessaries, to prosaic and
partially realized proposals to transfer certain kinds of property from
private to public ownership, or to limit their exploitation by
restrictions imposed by the State. But, however varying in emphasis
and in method, the general note of what may conveniently be called the
Socialist criticism of property is what the word Socialism itself
implies. Its essence is the statement that the economic evils of
society are primarily due to the unregulated operation, under modern
conditions of industrial organization, of the institution of private
property.
The divergence of opinion is natural, since in most discussions of
property the opposing theorists have usually been discussing different
things. Property is the most ambiguous of categories. It covers a
multitude of rights which have nothing in common except that they are
exercised by persons and enforced by the State. {54} Apart from these
formal characteristics, they vary indefinitely in economic character,
in social effect, and in moral justification. They may be conditional
like the grant of patent rights, or absolute like the ownership of
ground rents, terminable like copyright, or permanent like a freehold,
as comprehensive as sovereignty or as restricted as an easement, as
intimate and personal as the ownership of clothes and books, or as
remote and intangible as shares in a gold mine or rubber plantation.
It is idle, therefore, to present a case for or against private
property without specifying the particular forms of property to which
reference is made, and the journalist who says that "private property
is the foundation of civilization" agrees with Proudhon, who said it
was theft, in this respect at least that, without further definition,
the words of both are meaningless. Arguments which support or demolish
certain kinds of property may have no application to others;
considerations which are conclusive in one stage of economic
organization may be almost irrelevant in the next. The course of
wisdom is neither to attack private property in general nor to defend
it in general; for things are not similar in quality, merely because
they are identical in name. It is to discriminate between the various
concrete embodiments of what, in itself, is, after all, little more
than an abstraction.
The origin and development of different kinds of proprietary rights is
not material to this discussion. Whatever may have been the historical
process by which they have been established and recognized, the {55}
_rationale_ of private property traditional in England is that which
sees in it the security that each man will reap where he has sown. "If
I despair of enjoying the fruits of labor," said Bentham, repeating
what were in all essentials the arguments of Locke, "I shall only live
from day to day; I shall not undertake labors which will only benefit
my enemies." Property, it is argued, is a moral right, and not merely
a legal right, because it insures that the producer will not be
deprived by violence of the result of his efforts. The period from
which that doctrine was inherited differed from our own in three
obvious, but significant, respects. Property in land and in the simple
capital used in most industries was widely distributed. Before the
rise of capitalist agriculture and capitalist industry, the ownership,
or at any rate the secure and effective occupation, of land and tools
by those who used them, was a condition precedent to effective work in
the field or in the workshop. The forces which threatened property
were the fiscal policy of Governments and in some countries, for
example France, the decaying relics of feudalism. The interference
both of the one and of the other involved the sacrifice of those who
carried on useful labor to those who did not. To resist them was to
protect not only property but industry, which was indissolubly
connected with it. Too often, indeed, resistance was ineffective.
Accustomed to the misery of the rural proprietor in France, Voltaire
remarked with astonishment that in England the peasant may be rich, and
"does not fear to increase the number of his beasts or to cover his
roof with tiles." And {56} the English Parliamentarians and the French
philosophers who made the inviolability of property rights the center
of their political theory, when they defended those who owned, were
incidentally, if sometimes unintentionally, defending those who
labored. They were protecting the yeoman or the master craftsman or
the merchant from seeing the fruits of his toil squandered by the
hangers-on at St. James or the courtly parasites of Versailles.
In such circumstances the doctrine which found the justification of
private property in the fact that it enabled the industrious man to
reap where he had sown, was not a paradox, but, as far as the mass of
the population was concerned, almost a truism. Property was defended
as the most sacred of rights. But it was defended as a right which was
not only widely exercised, but which was indispensable to the
performance of the active function of providing food and clothing. For
it consisted predominantly of one of two types, land or tools which
were used by the owner for the purpose of production, and personal
possessions which were the necessities or amenities of civilized
existence. The former had its _rationale_ in the fact that the land of
the peasant or the tools of the craftsman were the condition of his
rendering the economic services which society required; the latter
because furniture and clothes are indispensable to a life of decency
and comfort. The proprietary rights--and, of course, they were
numerous--which had their source, not in work, but in predatory force,
were protected from criticism by the wide distribution of some kind
{57} of property among the mass of the population, and in England, at
least, the cruder of them were gradually whittled down. When property
in land and what simple capital existed were generally diffused among
all classes of society, when, in most parts of England, the typical
workman was not a laborer but a peasant or small master, who could
point to the strips which he had plowed or the cloth which he had
woven, when the greater part of the wealth passing at death consisted
of land, household furniture and a stock in trade which was hardly
distinguishable from it, the moral justification of the title to
property was self-evident. It was obviously, what theorists said that
it was, and plain men knew it to be, the labor spent in producing,
acquiring and administering it.
Such property was not a burden upon society, but a condition of its
health and efficiency, and indeed, of its continued existence. To
protect it was to maintain the organization through which public
necessities were supplied. If, as in Tudor England, the peasant was
evicted from his holding to make room for sheep, or crushed, as in
eighteenth century France, by arbitrary taxation and seigneurial dues,
land went out of cultivation and the whole community was short of food.
If the tools of the carpenter or smith were seized, plows were not
repaired or horses shod. Hence, before the rise of a commercial
civilization, it was the mark of statesmanship, alike in the England of
the Tudors and in the France of Henry IV, to cherish the small
property-owner even to the point of offending the great. Popular
sentiment idealized the {58} yeoman--"the Joseph of the country who
keeps the poor from starving"--not merely because he owned property,
but because he worked on it, denounced that "bringing of the livings of
many into the hands of one," which capitalist societies regard with
equanimity as an inevitable, and, apparently, a laudable result of
economic development, cursed the usurer who took advantage of his
neighbor's necessities to live without labor, was shocked by the
callous indifference to public welfare shown by those who "not having
before their eyes either God or the profit and advantage of the realm,
have enclosed with hedges and dykes towns and hamlets," and was
sufficiently powerful to compel Governments to intervene to prevent the
laying of field to field, and the engrossing of looms--to set limits,
in short, to the scale to which property might grow.
When Bacon, who commended Henry VII for protecting the tenant right of
the small farmer, and pleaded in the House of Commons for more drastic
land legislation, wrote "Wealth is like muck. It is not good but if it
be spread," he was expressing in an epigram what was the commonplace of
every writer on politics from Fortescue at the end of the fifteenth
century to Harrington in the middle of the seventeenth. The modern
conservative, who is inclined to take _au pied de la lettre_ the
vigorous argument in which Lord Hugh Cecil denounces the doctrine that
the maintenance of proprietary rights ought to be contingent upon the
use to which they are put, may be reminded that Lord Hugh's own theory
is of a kind to make his ancestors turn in their graves. Of the two
members of the {59} family who achieved distinction before the
nineteenth century, the elder advised the Crown to prevent landlords
evicting tenants, and actually proposed to fix a pecuniary maximum to
the property which different classes might possess, while the younger
attacked enclosing in Parliament, and carried legislation compelling
landlords to build cottages, to let them with small holdings, and to
plow up pasture.
William and Robert Cecil were sagacious and responsible men, and their
view that the protection of property should be accompanied by the
enforcement of obligations upon its owners was shared by most of their
contemporaries. The idea that the institution of private property
involves the right of the owner to use it, or refrain from using it, in
such a way as he may please, and that its principal significance is to
supply him with an income, irrespective of any duties which he may
discharge, would not have been understood by most public men of that
age, and, if understood, would have been repudiated with indignation by
the more reputable among them. They found the meaning of property in
the public purposes to which it contributed, whether they were the
production of food, as among the peasantry, or the management of public
affairs, as among the gentry, and hesitated neither to maintain those
kinds of property which met these obligations nor to repress those uses
of it which appeared likely to conflict with them. Property was to be
an aid to creative work, not an alternative to it. The patentee was
secured protection for a new invention, in order to secure him the
fruits of his own brain, but the monopolist who grew {60} fat on the
industry of others was to be put down. The law of the village bound
the peasant to use his land, not as he himself might find most
profitable, but to grow the corn the village needed. Long after
political changes had made direct interference impracticable, even the
higher ranks of English landowners continued to discharge, however
capriciously and tyrannically, duties which were vaguely felt to be the
contribution which they made to the public service in virtue of their
estates. When as in France, the obligations of ownership were
repudiated almost as completely as they have been by the owner of
to-day, nemesis came in an onslaught upon the position of a _noblesse_
which had retained its rights and abdicated its functions. Property
reposed, in short, not merely upon convenience, or the appetite for
gain, but on a moral principle. It was protected not only for the sake
of those who owned, but for the sake of those who worked and of those
for whom their work provided. It was protected, because, without
security for property, wealth could not be produced or the business of
society carried on.
Whatever the future may contain, the past has shown no more excellent
social order than that in which the mass of the people were the masters
of the holdings which they plowed and of the tools with which they
worked, and could boast, with the English freeholder, that "it is a
quietness to a man's mind to live upon his own and to know his heir
certain." With this conception of property and its practical
expression in social institutions those who urge that society should be
{61} organized on the basis of function have no quarrel. It is in
agreement with their own doctrine, since it justifies property by
reference to the services which it enables its owner to perform. All
that they need ask is that it should be carried to its logical
conclusion.
For the argument has evidently more than one edge. If it justifies
certain types of property, it condemns others; and in the conditions of
modern industrial civilization, what it justifies is less than what it
condemns. The truth is, indeed, that this theory of property and the
institutions in which it is embodied have survived into an age in which
the whole structure of society is radically different from that in
which it was formulated, and which made it a valid argument, if not for
all, at least for the most common and characteristic kinds of property.
It is not merely that the ownership of any substantial share in the
national wealth is concentrated to-day in the hands of a few hundred
thousand families, and that at the end of an age which began with an
affirmation of the rights of property, proprietary rights are, in fact,
far from being widely distributed. Nor is it merely that what makes
property insecure to-day is not the arbitrary taxation of
unconstitutional monarchies or the privileges of an idle _noblesse_,
but the insatiable expansion and aggregation of property itself, which
menaces with absorption all property less than the greatest, the small
master, the little shopkeeper, the country bank, and has turned the
mass of mankind into a proletariat working under the agents and for the
profit of those who own.