ate Ownership is only a phase, though no
doubt quite a necessary phase, in human development. The world has
needed Private Ownership just as (Lester F. Ward declares[5]) it once
needed slavery to discipline men and women to agriculture and habits
of industry, and just as it needed autocratic kings to weld warring
tribes into nations and nations into empires, to build high roads, end
private war and establish the idea of Law, and a wider than tribal
loyalty. But just as Western Europe has passed out of the phases of
slavery and of autocracy (which is national slavery) into
constitutionalism, so, he would hold, we are passing out of the phase
of private ownership of land and material and food. We are doing so
not because we reject it, but because we have worked it out, because
we have learnt its lessons and can now go on to a higher and finer
organization.

[5] _Pure Sociology_, p. 271-2, by Lester F. Ward. (The
Macmillan Company, New York.)

There the Anti-Socialist would join issue with a lesser advantage. He
would have to show not only that Private Ownership has been
serviceable and justifiable in the past--which many Socialists admit
quite cheerfully--but that it is the crown and perfection of human
methods, which the Socialists flatly deny. Universal Private
Ownership, an extreme development of the sentiment of individual
autonomy and the limitation of the State to the merest police
functions, were a necessary outcome of the breakdown of the
unprogressive authoritative Feudal System in alliance with a dogmatic
Church. It reached its maximum in the eighteenth century, when even
some of the prisons and workhouses were run by private contract, when
people issued a private money, the old token coinage, and even
regiments of soldiers were raised by private enterprise. It was, the
Socialist alleges, a mere phase of that breaking up of the old social
edifice, a weakening of the old circle of ideas that had to precede
the new constructive effort. But with land, with all sorts of property
and all sorts of businesses and public services, just as with the old
isolated private family, the old separateness and independence is
giving way to a new synthesis. The idea of Private Ownership, albeit
still the ruling idea of our civilization, does not rule nearly so
absolutely as it did. It weakens and falters before the inexorable
demands of social necessity--manifestly under our eyes.

The Socialist would be able to ap