THE REVOLUTION SAVES PRIVATE PROPERTY FROM MONOPOLY.
"Really," said her mother, "Edith touched the match to quite a large
discussion when she suggested that you should open the safe for us."
To which I added that I had learned more that morning about the moral
basis of economic equality and the grounds for the abolition of private
property than in my entire previous experience as a citizen of the
twentieth century.
"The abolition of private property!" exclaimed the doctor. "What is that
you say?"
"Of course," I said, "I am quite ready to admit that you have
something--very much better in its place, but private property you have
certainly abolished--have you not? Is not that what we have been talking
about?"
The doctor turned as if for sympathy to the ladies. "And this young
man," he said, "who thinks that we have abolished private property has at
this moment in his pocket a card of credit representing a private annual
income, for strictly personal use, of four thousand dollars, based upon a
share of stock in the wealthiest and soundest corporation in the world,
the value of his share, calculating the income on a four-per-cent basis,
coming to one hundred thousand dollars."
I felt a little silly at being convicted so palpably of making a
thoughtless observation, but the doctor hastened to say that he
understood perfectly what had been in my mind. I had, no doubt, heard it
a hundred times asserted by the wise men of my day that the equalization
of human conditions as to wealth would necessitate destroying the
institution of private property, and, without having given special
thought to the subject, had naturally assumed that the equalization of
wealth having been effected, private property must have been abolished,
according to the prediction.
"Thanks," I said; "that is it exactly."
"The Revolution," said the doctor, "abolished private capitalism--that is
to say, it put an end to the direction of the industries and commerce of
the people by irresponsible persons for their own benefit and transferred
that function to the people collectively to be carried on by responsible
agents for the common benefit. The change created an entirely new system
of property holding, but did not either directly or indirectly involve
any denial of the right of private property. Quite on the contrary, the
change in system placed the private and personal property rights of every
citizen upon a basis incomparably more solid and secure and extensive
than they ever before had or could have had while private capitalism
lasted. Let us analyze the effects of the change of systems and see if it
was not so."
"Suppose you and a number of other men of your time, all having separate
claims in a mining region, formed a corporation to carry on as one mine
your consolidated properties, would you have any less private property
than you had when you owned your claims separately? You would have
changed the mode and tenure of your property, but if the arrangement were
a wise one that would be wholly to your advantage, would it not?"
"No doubt."
"Of course, you could no longer exercise the personal and complete
control over the consolidated mine which you exercised over your separate
claim. You would have, with your fellow-corporators, to intrust the
management of the combined property to a board of directors chosen by
yourselves, but you would not think that meant a sacrifice of your
private property, would you?"
"Certainly not. That was the form under which a very large part, if not
the largest part, of private property in my day was invested and
controlled."
"It appears, then," said the doctor, "that it is not necessary to the
full possession and enjoyment of private property that it should be in a
separate parcel or that the owner should exercise a direct and personal
control over it. Now, let us further suppose that instead of intrusting
the management of your consolidated property to private directors more or
less rascally, who would be constantly trying to cheat the stockholders,
the nation undertook to manage the business for you by agents chosen by
and responsible to you; would that be an attack on your property
interests?"
"On the contrary, it would greatly enhance the value of the property. It
would be as if a government guarantee were obtained for private bonds."
"Well, that is what the people in the Revolution did with private
property. They simply consolidated the property in the country previously
held in separate parcels and put the management of the business into the
hands of a national agency charged with paying over the dividends to the
stockholders for their individual use. So far, surely, it must be
admitted the Revolution did not involve any abolition of private
property."
"That is true," said I, "except in one particular. It is or used to be a
usual incident to the ownership of property that it may be disposed of at
will by the owner. The owner of stock in a mine or mill could not indeed
sell a piece of the mine or mill, but he could sell his stock in it; but
the citizen now can not dispose of his share in the national concern. He
can only dispose of the dividend."
"Certainly," replied the doctor; "but while the power of alienating the
principal of one's property was a usual incident of ownership in your
time, it was very far from being a necessary incident or one which was
beneficial to the owner, for the right of disposing of property involved
the risk of being dispossessed of it by others. I think there were few
property owners in your day who would not very gladly have relinquished
the right to alienate their property if they could have had it guaranteed
indefeasibly to them and their children. So to tie up property by trusts
that the beneficiary could not touch the principal was the study of rich
people who desired best to protect their heirs. Take the case of entailed
estates as another illustration of this idea. Under that mode of holding
property the possessor could not sell it, yet it was considered the most
desirable sort of property on account of that very fact. The fact you
refer to--that the citizen can not alienate his share in the national
corporation which forms the basis of his income--tends in the same way to
make it a more and not a less valuable sort of property. Certainly its
quality as a strictly personal and private sort of property is
intensified by the very indefeasibleness with which it is attached to the
individual. It might be said that the reorganization of the property
system which we are speaking of amounted to making the United States an
entailed estate for the equal benefit of the citizens thereof and their
descendants forever."
"You have not yet mentioned" I said, "the most drastic measure of all by
which the Revolution affected private property, namely, the absolute
equalizing of the amount of property to be held by each. Here was not
perhaps any denial of the principle itself of private property, but it
was certainly a prodigious interference with property holders."
"The distinction is well made. It is of vital importance to a correct
apprehension of this subject. History has been full of just such
wholesale readjustments of property interests by spoliation, conquest, or
confiscation. They have been more or less justifiable, but when least so
they were never thought to involve any denial of the idea of private
property in itself, for they went right on to reassert it under a
different form. Less than any previous readjustment of property relations
could the general equalizing of property in the Revolution be called a
denial of the right of property. On the precise contrary it was an
assertion and vindication of that right on a scale never before dreamed
of. Before the Revolution very few of the people had any property at all
and no economic provision save from day to day. By the new system all
were assured of a large, equal, and fixed share in the total national
principal and income. Before the Revolution even those who had secured a
property were likely to have it taken from them or to slip from them by a
thousand accidents. Even the millionaire had no assurance that his
grandson might not become a homeless vagabond or his granddaughter be
forced to a life of shame. Under the new system the title of every
citizen to his individual fortune became indefeasible, and he could lose
it only when the nation became bankrupt. The Revolution, that is to say,
instead of denying or abolishing the institution of private property,
affirmed it in an incomparably more positive, beneficial, permanent, and
general form than had ever been known before.
"Of course, Julian, it was in the way of human nature quite a matter of
course that your contemporaries should have cried out against the idea of
a universal right of property as an attack on the principle of property.
There was never a prophet or reformer who raised his voice for a purer,
more spiritual, and perfect idea of religion whom his contemporaries did
not accuse of seeking to abolish religion; nor ever in political affairs
did any party proclaim a juster, larger, wiser ideal of government
without being accused of seeking to abolish government. So it was quite
according to precedent that those who taught the right of all to property
should be accused of attacking the right of property. But who, think you,
were the true friends and champions of private property? those who
advocated a system under which one man if clever enough could monopolize
the earth--and a very small number were fast monopolizing it--turning the
rest of the race into proletarians, or, on the other hand, those who
demanded a system by which all should become property holders on equal
terms?"
"It strikes me," I said, "that as soon as the revolutionary leaders
succeeded in opening the eyes of the people to this view of the matter,
my old friends the capitalists must have found their cry about 'the
sacred right of property' turned into a most dangerous sort of
boomerang."
"So they did. Nothing could have better served the ends of the
Revolution, as we have seen, than to raise the issue of the right of
property. Nothing was so desirable as that the people at large should be
led to give a little serious consideration on rational and moral grounds
to what that right was as compared with what it ought to be. It was very
soon, then, that the cry of 'the sacred right of property,' first raised
by the rich in the name of the few, was re-echoed with overwhelming
effect by the disinherited millions in the name of all."