seness with which they approximate to one
or other of these two extremes, it would be found that they were spread
along a line stretching from property which is obviously the payment
for, and condition of, personal services, to property which is merely a
right to payment from the services rendered by others, in fact a
private tax. The rough order which would emerge, if all details and
qualification were omitted, might be something as follows:--

1. Property in payments made for personal services.

2. Property in personal possessions necessary to health and comfort.

3. Property in land and tools used by their owners.

4. Property in copyright and patent rights owned by authors and
inventors.

5. Property in pure interest, including much agricultural rent.

6. Property in profits of luck and good fortune: "quasi-rents."

7. Property in monopoly profits.

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8. Property in urban ground rents.

9. Property in royalties.

The first four kinds of property obviously accompany, and in some sense
condition, the performance of work. The last four obviously do not.
Pure interest has some affinities with both. It represents a necessary
economic cost, the equivalent of which must be born, whatever the legal
arrangements under which property is held, and is thus unlike the
property represented by profits (other than the equivalent of salaries
and payment for necessary risk), urban ground-rents and royalties. It
relieves the recipient from personal services, and thus resembles them.

The crucial question for any society is, under which each of these two
broad groups of categories the greater part (measured in value) of the
proprietary rights which it maintains are at any given moment to be
found. If they fall in the first group creative work will be
encouraged and idleness will be depressed; if they fall in the second,
the result will be the reverse. The facts vary widely from age to age
and from country to country. Nor have they ever been fully revealed;
for the lords of the jungle do not hunt by daylight. It is probable,
at least, that in the England of 1550 to 1750, a larger proportion of
the existing property consisted of land and tools used by their owners
than either in contemporary France, where feudal dues absorbed a
considerable proportion of the peasants' income, or than in the England
of 1800 to 1850, where the new capitalist manufacturers made hundreds
per cent. while manual workers were