no, would no more be able to abolish personal property altogether
than he would be able to abolish the human liver. The extension of
one's personality to things outside oneself is indeed as natural and
instinctive a thing as eating. But because the liver is necessary and
inevitable, there is no reason why it should be enlarged to
uncomfortable proportions, and because eating is an unconquerable
instinct there is no excuse for repletion. The position of the modern
Socialist is that the contemporary idea of personal property is
enormously exaggerated and improperly extended to things that ought
not to be "private"; not that it is not a socially most useful and
desirable idea within its legitimate range.

There can be no doubt that many of those older writers who were
"Socialists before Socialism," Plato, for instance, and Sir Thomas
More, did very roundly abolish private property altogether. They were
extreme Communists, and so were many of the earlier Socialists; in
More's Utopia, doors might not be fastened, they stood open; one
hadn't even a private room. These earlier writers wished to insist
upon the need of self-abnegation in the ideal State, and to startle
and confound, they insisted overmuch. The early Christians, one
gathers, were almost completely communistic, and that interesting
experiment in Christian Socialism (of a rather unorthodox type of
Christianity), the American Oneida community, was successfully
communistic in every respect for many years. But the modern Socialist
is not a communist; the modern Socialist, making his scheme of social
reconstruction for the whole world and for every type of character,
recognizes the entire impracticability of such dreams, recognizing,
too, it may be, the sacrifice of human personality and distinction
such ideals involve.

The word "property," one must remember, is a slightly evasive word.
Absolute property hardly exists--absolute, that is to say, in the
sense of unlimited right of disposal; almost all property is
incomplete and relative. A man, under our present laws, has no
absolute property even in his own life; he is restrained from suicide
and punished if he attempt it. He may not go offensively filthy nor
indecently clad; there are limits to his free use of his body. The
owner of a house, of land, of a factory is subject to all sorts of
limitations, building regulations for example, and so is the owner of
horse or dog. Nor again is any property exempt from taxat