extreme dislike to any broad generalisation, and
preferred rather, whenever the occasion could be discovered, to
distinguish rather than to concede or deny. Hence, confronted by the
communistic theory of State ownership which had been advanced by Plato,
and by a curious group of strange, heterodox teachers, and which had,
moreover, the actual support of many patristic sayings, and the strong
bias of monastic life, they set out joyfully to resolve it into the
simplest and most unassailable series of propositions. They began,
therefore, by admitting that nature made no division of property, and in
that sense held all things in common; that in the early stages of human
history, when man, as yet unfallen, was conceived as living in the
Garden of Eden in perfect innocency, common property amply satisfied his
sinless and unselfish moral character; that by the Fall lust and greed
overthrew this idyllic state, and led to a continued condition of
internecine strife, and the supremacy of might; that experience
gradually brought men to realise that their only hope towards peaceful
intercourse lay in the actual division of property, and the
establishment of a system of private ownership; that this could only be
set aside by men who were themselves perfect, or had vowed themselves to
pursue perfection, namely, Our Lord, His Apostles, and the members of
religious orders. To this list of what they held to be historic events
they added another which contained the moral deductions to be made from
these facts. This began by the assertion that private property in itself
was not in any sense contrary to the virtue of justice; that it was
entirely lawful; that it was even necessary on account of certain evil
conditions which otherwise would prevail; that the State, however, had
the right in extreme cases and for a just cause to transfer private
property from one to another; that it could, when the needs of its
citizens so demanded, reverse its primitive decision, and re-establish
its earlier form of common ownership; that this last system, however
possible, and however much it might be regretted as a vanished and lost
ideal, was decidedly now a violent and impracticable proceeding.

These theories, it is evident, though they furnish the only arguments
which are still in use among us to support the present social
organisation, are also patent of an interpretation which might equally
lead to the very opposite conclusion. In his fear of any ge