p to-day.
Property is not simple but complex. That of a man who has invested his
savings as an ordinary shareholder comprises at least three rights, the
right to interest, the right to profits, the right to control. In so
far as what is desired is the guarantee for the maintenance of a stable
income, not the acquisition of additional wealth without labor--in so
far as his motive is not gain but security--the need is met by interest
on capital. It has no necessary connection either with the right to
residuary profits or the right to control the management of the
undertaking from which the profits are derived, both of which are
vested to-day in the shareholder. If all that were desired were to use
property as an instrument for purchasing security, the obvious
course--from the point of view of the investor desiring to insure his
future the safest course--would be to assimilate his position as far as
possible to that of a debenture holder or mortgagee, who obtains the
stable income which is his motive for investment, but who neither
incurs the risks nor receives the profits of the speculator. To insist
that the elaborate apparatus of proprietary rights which {76}
distributes dividends of thirty per cent to the shareholders in Coats,
and several thousands a year to the owner of mineral royalties and
ground-rents, and then allows them to transmit the bulk of gains which
they have not earned to descendants who in their turn will thus be
relieved from the necessity of earning, must be maintained for the sake
of the widow and the orphan, the vast majority of whom have neither and
would gladly part with them all for a safe annuity if they had, is, to
say the least of it, extravagantly _mal-a-propos_. It is like pitching
a man into the water because he expresses a wish for a bath, or
presenting a tiger cub to a householder who is plagued with mice, on
the ground that tigers and cats both belong to the genus _felis_. The
tiger hunts for itself not for its masters, and when game is scarce
will hunt them. The classes who own little or no property may
reverence it because it is security. But the classes who own much
prize it for quite different reasons, and laugh in their sleeve at the
innocence which supposes that anything as vulgar as the savings of the
_petite bourgeoisie_ have, except at elections, any interest for them.
They prize it because it is the order which quarters them on the
community and which provides for the m