The preceding considerations appear sufficient to show that an entire
renovation of the social fabric, such as is contemplated by Socialism,
establishing the economic constitution of society upon an entirely new
basis, other than that of private property and competition, however
valuable as an ideal, and even as a prophecy of ultimate
possibilities, is not available as a present resource, since it
requires from those who are to carry on the new order of things
qualities both moral and intellectual, which require to be tested in
all, and to be created in most; and this cannot be done by an Act of
Parliament, but must be, on the most favorable supposition, a work of
considerable time. For a long period to come the principle of
individual property will be in possession of the field; and even if in
any country a popular movement were to place Socialists at the head of
a revolutionary government, in however many ways they might violate
private property, the institution itself would survive, and would
either be accepted by them or brought back by their expulsion, for the
plain reason that people will not lose their hold of what is at
present their sole reliance for subsistence and security until a
substitute for it has been got into working order. Even those, if any,
who had shared among themselves what was the property of others would
desire to keep what they had acquired, and to give back to property in
the new hands the sacredness which they had not recognised in the old.
But though, for these reasons, individual property has presumably a
long term before it, if only of provisional existence, we are not,
therefore, to conclude that it must exist during that whole term
unmodified, or that all the rights now regarded as appertaining to
property belong to it inherently, and must endure while it endures. On
the contrary, it is both the duty and the interest of those who derive
the most direct benefit from the laws of property to give impartial
consideration to all proposals for rendering those laws in any way
less onerous to the majority. This, which would in any case be an
obligation of justice, is an injunction of prudence also, in order to
place themselves in the right against the attempts which are sure to
be frequent to bring the Socialist forms of society prematurely into
operation.
One of the mistakes oftenest committed, and which are the sources of
the greatest practical errors in human affairs, is that of supposing
that the same name always stands for the same aggregation of ideas. No
word has been the subject of more of this kind of misunderstanding
than the word property. It denotes in every state of society the
largest powers of exclusive use or exclusive control over things (and
sometimes, unfortunately, over persons) which the law accords, or
which custom, in that state of society, recognizes; but these powers
of exclusive use and control are very various, and differ greatly in
different countries and in different states of society.
For instance, in early states of society, the right of property did
not include the right of bequest. The power of disposing of property
by will was in most countries of Europe a rather late institution; and
long after it was introduced it continued to be limited in favor of
what were called natural heirs. Where bequest is not permitted,
individual property is only a life interest. And in fact, as has been
so well and fully set forth by Sir Henry Maine in his most instructive
work on Ancient Law, the primitive idea of property was that it
belonged to the family, not the individual. The head of the family had
the management and was the person who really exercised the proprietary
rights. As in other respects, so in this, he governed the family with
nearly despotic power. But he was not free so to exercise his power as
to defeat the co-proprietors of the other portions; he could not so
dispose of the property as to deprive them of the joint enjoyment or
of the succession. By the laws and customs of some nations the
property could not be alienated without the consent of the male
children; in other cases the child could by law demand a division of
the property and the assignment to him of his share, as in the story
of the Prodigal Son. If the association kept together after the death
of the head, some other member of it, not always his son, but often
the eldest of the family, the strongest, or the one selected by the
rest, succeeded to the management and to the managing rights, all the
others retaining theirs as before. If, on the other hand the body
broke up into separate families, each of these took away with it a
part of the property. I say the property, not the inheritance, because
the process was a mere continuance of existing rights, not a creation
of new; the manager's share alone lapsed to the association.
Then, again, in regard to proprietary rights over immovables (the
principal kind of property in a rude age) these rights were of very
varying extent and duration. By the Jewish law property in immovables
was only a temporary concession; on the Sabbatical year it returned to
the common stock to be redistributed; though we may surmise that in
the historical times of the Jewish state this rule may have been
successfully evaded. In many countries of Asia, before European ideas
intervened, nothing existed to which the expression property in land,
as we understand the phrase, is strictly applicable. The ownership was
broken up among several distinct parties, whose rights were determined
rather by custom than by law. The government was part owner, having
the right to a heavy rent. Ancient ideas and even ancient laws limited
the government share to some particular fraction of the gross produce,
but practically there was no fixed limit. The government might make
over its share to an individual, who then became possessed of the
right of collection and all the other rights of the state, but not
those of any private person connected with the soil. These private
rights were of various kinds. The actual cultivators or such of them
as had been long settled on the land, had a right to retain
possession; it was held unlawful to evict them while they paid the
rent--a rent not in general fixed by agreement, but by the custom of
the neighborhood. Between the actual cultivators and the state, or the
substitute to whom the state had transferred its rights, there were
intermediate persons with rights of various extent. There were
officers of government who collected the state's share of the produce,
sometimes for large districts, who, though bound to pay over to
government all they collected, after deducting a percentage, were
often hereditary officers. There were also, in many cases village
communities, consisting of the reputed descendants of the first
settlers of a village, who shared among themselves either the land or
its produce according to rules established by custom, either
cultivating it themselves or employing others to cultivate it for
them, and whose rights in the land approached nearer to those of a
landed proprietor, as understood in England, than those of any other
party concerned. But the proprietary right of the village was not
individual, but collective; inalienable (the rights of individual
sharers could only be sold or mortgaged with the consent of the
community) and governed by fixed rules. In mediaeval Europe almost all
land was held from the sovereign on tenure of service, either military
or agricultural; and in Great Britain even now, when the services as
well as all the reserved rights of the sovereign have long since
fallen into disuse or been commuted for taxation, the theory of the
law does not acknowledge an absolute right of property in land in any
individual; the fullest landed proprietor known to the law, the
freeholder, is but a "tenant" of the Crown. In Russia, even when the
cultivators of the soil were serfs of the landed proprietor, his
proprietary right in the land was limited by rights of theirs
belonging to them as a collective body managing its own affairs, and
with which he could not interfere. And in most of the countries of
continental Europe when serfage was abolished or went out of use,
those who had cultivated the land as serfs remained in possession of
rights as well as subject to obligations. The great land reforms of
Stein and his successors in Prussia consisted in abolishing both the
rights and the obligations, and dividing the land bodily between the
proprietor and the peasant, instead of leaving each of them with a
limited right over the whole. In other cases, as in Tuscany, the
_metayer_ farmer is virtually co-proprietor with the landlord, since
custom, though not law, guarantees to him a permanent possession and
half the gross produce, so long as he fulfils the customary conditions
of his tenure.
Again: if rights of property over the same things are of different
extent in different countries, so also are they exercised over
different things. In all countries at a former time, and in some
countries still, the right of property extended and extends to the
ownership of human beings. There has often been property in public
trusts, as in judicial offices, and a vast multitude of others in
France before the Revolution; there are still a few patent offices in
Great Britain, though I believe they will cease by operation of law on
the death of the present holders; and we are only now abolishing
property in army rank. Public bodies, constituted and endowed for
public purposes, still claim the same inviolable right of property in
their estates which individuals have in theirs, and though a sound
political morality does not acknowledge this claim, the law supports
it. We thus see that the right of property is differently interpreted,
and held to be of different extent, in different times and places;
that the conception entertained of it is a varying conception, has
been frequently revised, and may admit of still further revision. It
is also to be noticed that the revisions which it has hitherto
undergone in the progress of society have generally been improvements.
When, therefore, it is maintained, rightly or wrongly, that some
change or modification in the powers exercised over things by the
persons legally recognised as their proprietors would be beneficial to
the public and conducive to the general improvement, it is no good
answer to this merely to say that the proposed change conflicts with
the idea of property. The idea of property is not some one thing,
identical throughout history and incapable of alteration, but is
variable like all other creations of the human mind; at any given time
it is a brief expression denoting the rights over things conferred by
the law or custom of some given society at that time; but neither on
this point nor on any other has the law and custom of a given time and
place a claim to be stereotyped for ever. A proposed reform in laws
or customs is not necessarily objectionable because its adoption would
imply, not the adaptation of all human affairs to the existing idea of
property, but the adaptation of existing ideas of property to the
growth and improvement of human affairs. This is said without
prejudice to the equitable claim of proprietors to be compensated by
the state for such legal rights of a proprietary nature as they may be
dispossessed of for the public advantage. That equitable claim, the
grounds and the just limits of it, are a subject by itself, and as
such will be discussed hereafter. Under this condition, however,
society is fully entitled to abrogate or alter any particular right of
property which on sufficient consideration it judges to stand in the
way of the public good. And assuredly the terrible case which, as we
saw in a former chapter, Socialists are able to make out against the
present economic order of society, demands a full consideration of all
means by which the institution may have a chance of being made to work
in a manner more beneficial to that large portion of society which at
present enjoys the least share of its direct benefits.