the Christian men to whom God in his infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of the country, and upon the successful management of which so much depends ". § 8. TENDENCY TO IDENTIFY PROPERTY WITH OWNERSHIP

As a result of its highly institutionalized position in American life, property has tended to become a static rather than a dynamic thing. Property exists to be owned; its significance is largely exhausted in the relation of ownership. It seldom occurs to the man on the street that a piece of valuable unimproved property in the heart of the city is any less property because it serves no creative purpose. Its status as property is fixed by the legal relation it sustains to some owner, not in the extent to which it liberates human activities or enriches the community life. Even institutions such as churches and universities, dealing with the intangible intellectual and spiritual values, must be owned by trustees before they can have institutional reality. Ownership is the measure of existence.

The idea of ownership as constituting the essence of property may be pushed to such an extreme that it becomes downright anti-social in spirit and intent. Property is that which is essentially private. It is my own just to the extent to which I succeed in keeping its use from being shared by others. This is the implication of the sign one often meets on unoccupied and unimproved property, "Private property, no thoroughfare". This thrusts into one's face, as the very essence of the right of private property, that it is exclusive, selfish, and antagonistic to all that is social or shared in common. It is this narrow spirit that stirs the opponent of private property and makes him see in it the avowed enemy of the community.

An implication of an ethic of private property that stresses ownership is that what cannot be owned is worthless, unreal, negligible. The permanent values are associated with those things that can be bartered for, subjected to fixed legal relations of ownership. Now it so happens that the most precious possessions of the race are just those that cannot be

owned in the legal business sense. The poetry of Homer, the philosophy of Plato, the great Gothic cathedrals, the masterpieces of Shakespeare, Goethe or Molière, the creations of Bach and Beethoven belong to the race. Who would be so ridiculous as to talk of sustaining relations of legal ownership to the religious ideas of Jesus or John Wesley? There is no such thing as a monopoly of ownership in the highest and best things. In fact, we can only enjoy them by sharing them. Our glorification of ownership must be content with the cruder and coarser goods of life. We may have a trust in oil, hardly a trust in religion, science or art.

The scale of values created by the ethic of ownership tends to take precedence over the intangible higher values to which we do homage in our better moments. Only slowly did rights dealing with intellectual property find formulation in laws governing plagiarism, copyright, and the like. With the average man it is still a much more serious offense to filch a man's pocketbook than to filch his ideas. How little those subtle spiritual rights associated with academic freedom appeal to the average man! The strength of the scientific conscience of the scholar or investigator cannot be reduced to dollars and cents and hence it is a negligible matter.

There are other rights such as the right to be well-born, the right to civic cleanliness recognized by ancient Rome, the right to a minimum wage or to an assured income among those classes whose economic margin is small, that have been discouragingly slow in gaining a place in the social conscience. The reason is not far to seek. The discipline of the ethic of private property has dulled the sensibilities of men to these things. The right to work (droit du travail) or the right to sell one's labor in the best market harmonizes with the ethic of property; the right to work (droit au travail) or the right to steady employment conflicts with the ethic of property and has been opposed. The right of the child to live its life gladly, freely, and healthfully is a remote and intangible good as compared with the time-honored and legally entrenched property rights of the mill-owner that are restricted by child labor

legislation. The large property owner is asked to substitute for the immediate tangible goods of profits on investment the intangible human values of a more enlightened and efficient citizenship. These things, however, do not have a market value. They belong to the "imponderables" that cannot be owned, bought, sold. For similar reasons municipal regulations that look to cleaner streets, decent tenements, efficient car service, though of acknowledged importance, are distressingly slow of attainment because they are opposed by a social conscience that thinks in terms of the ethic of private property.

The pressure of the ethic of ownership is producing some interesting alignments among social groups. It is aligning the average enlightened propertyless citizen with his vote against the property owner with his constitutional safeguards for property. This alignment has not been consciously made for the most part because the average propertyless American is not opposed to the institution of private property. He is not ready to say of private property, as Voltaire and the forerunners of the French Revolution said of the church, écraser l'infâme. But all who are struggling for a more progressive democracy have been forced inevitably into the group opposed to the privileged position of private property. The average man often finds that his legitimate efforts after a richer expansion of his powers, his worthy desire for a social order in which a larger number of men and women can enter fully and intensively into the enjoyment of those things that make for a better world, is checked by private property. He then begins to wonder whether we have not reached a stage of social evolution in which the demands made upon property are no longer fully met by the traditional ideas. The highly favored position held by private property in American institutions serves only to make men all the more sensitive to its failure to adjust itself to the demands of a new day. The stubborn and in the main the successful resistance private property has offered to this rising tide of democracy has affected the development of the social conscience itself.

It has forced men to find the satisfaction of their democratic needs along lines least antagonistic to private property, such as the extension of the suffrage, the spread of public education, the alleviation of suffering through philanthropy, and the democratizing of art. Any move looking towards industrial democracy has met with stubborn opposition owing to the prevailing ethic of private property.

§ 9. INSTRUMENTALITIES FOR SOCIALIZING PRIVATE PROPERTY.

The method of procedure of the acquisitive instinct underlying ownership is entirely logical, though it may seem harsh, materialistic and blind to the other nobler creative impulses of the human heart. It seeks to acquire what is its due and to retain what is not its due, for the principle of acquisition works in one direction only. To yield to the demands of social justice or to gratify the more socially valuable creative impulses would decrease owning power. In this ethic whatever makes for possession is good and whatever militates against possession is evil. There are no sentimental illusions, no waste of time and energy, no idealistic dreams. If we quarrel with such an ethic we should remember that it is not inherent in the nature of the institution of private property which is intrinsically neither good nor bad. Our quarrel should be with the social situation, the traditions and habits of thought that make such an ethic of property possible. The problem is really one of creating a new social conscience inspired by a deeper insight into the meaning of property itself, a conscience which realizes that private property is a social trust. question arises, how is this to be done without a radical departure from American traditions? To this query the natural reply is that we have a remedy ready at hand, namely, taxation.

The

The ethical justification of taxation lies in the fact society realizes that all the social instrumentalities for progress, such as health regulations, welfare bureaus, scientific school systems, are most important factors in the creation of the wealth of the community. There is a very real sense in which

the building of streets, the improvement of car service, the providing of good water, the safeguarding of child life, and even those more intangible movements for the Americanization of the immigrant or the cultivation of civic spirit actually add to the value of the private property of individuals who are often indifferent, sometimes antagonistic to these things. The community that assures through its schools and health department a body of strong, intelligent, and contented laborers for the mill-operator has actually contributed no small factor to his wealth-producing facilities, for which there is no specific return except in taxes.

If we take the broad social point of view as to the origin and nature of property suggested by the ethics of taxation, we must question the absolute right of private property as over against the rights of the community. These rights, together with all others, originate in the state, and to the state and community they must look for their sanction. The community with its vast complex of institutions provides the individual with many varied instrumentalities for the development of his powers, one among them being the right of private property. Because the community makes possible these forms of individual achievement it demands the right to regulate the affairs of the individual in the prosecution of his ends. It can determine the methods by which wealth is accumulated and it can also direct how that wealth shall be expended where such expenditure is of vital concern for the welfare of the community.

There is another striking illustration of the social nature of property in the right of eminent domain. This has been defined by the Supreme Court as "the ultimate right of the sovereign power to appropriate, not only the public property, but the private property of all citizens within the territorial sovereignty, to public uses." This fundamental right of society in the land is probably to be traced back to an earlier undifferentiated stage when all land was held in common. We have no reason to believe that this right 1 Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge, 11 Peters, 420 (1837).

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