very right itself could be set aside, and every private
possession (when public utility and liberty demanded it) confiscated or
transferred to another.

Even the right to compensation for such confiscation was with equal
cleverness explained away. For it was held that, when an individual had
lost his property through State action, and without his having done
anything to deserve it as a punishment, compensation could be claimed.
But whenever a whole people or nation was dispossessed by the State,
there was no such right at all to any indemnity.

Thus was the wholesale adoption of land-nationalism to be justified.
Thus could the State capture all private possessions without any fear of
being guilty of robbery. It was considered that it was only the
oppression of the individual and class spoliation which really
contravened the moral law.

The legal theories, therefore, which supplanted the old feudal concepts
were based on the extension of royal authority, and the establishment of
public rights. Individualistic possession was emphasised; yet the
simultaneous setting up of the absolute monarchies of the sixteenth
century really made their ultimate capture by the Socialist party more
possible.

CHAPTER VI

THE SOCIAL REFORMERS

It may seem strange to class social reforms under the wider heading of
Socialistic Theories, and the only justification for doing so is that
which we have already put forward in defence of the whole book; namely,
that the term "socialistic" has come to bear so broad an interpretation
as to include a great deal that does not strictly belong to it. And it
is only on the ground of their advocating State interference in the
furtherance of their reforms that the reformers here mentioned can be
spoken of as socialistic.

Of course there have been reformers in every age who came to bring to
society their own personal measures of relief. But in the Middle Ages
hardly a writer took pen in hand who did not note in the body politic
some illness, and suggest some remedy. Howsoever abstruse might be the
subject of the volume, there was almost sure to be a reference to
economic or social life. It was not an epoch of specialists such as is
ours. Each author composed treatises in almost every branch of learning.
The same professor, according to mediaeval notions, might lecture to-day
on Scripture, to-morrow on theology or philosophy, and the day after on
natural science. For them a university was a p