reticent though it was, had
in effect done the same. The great individualists from Locke to
Turgot, Adam Smith and Bentham all repeated, in different language, a
similar conception. Though what gave the Revolution its {53}
diabolical character in the eyes of the English upper classes was its
treatment of property, the dogma of the sanctity of private property
was maintained as tenaciously by French Jacobins as by English Tories;
and the theory that property is an absolute, which is held by many
modern Conservatives, is identical, if only they knew it, with that not
only of the men of 1789, but of the Convention itself.

On the other hand, the attack has been almost as undiscriminating as
the defense. "Private property" has been the central position against
which the social movement of the last hundred years has directed its
forces. The criticism of it has ranged from an imaginative communism
in the most elementary and personal of necessaries, to prosaic and
partially realized proposals to transfer certain kinds of property from
private to public ownership, or to limit their exploitation by
restrictions imposed by the State. But, however varying in emphasis
and in method, the general note of what may conveniently be called the
Socialist criticism of property is what the word Socialism itself
implies. Its essence is the statement that the economic evils of
society are primarily due to the unregulated operation, under modern
conditions of industrial organization, of the institution of private
property.

The divergence of opinion is natural, since in most discussions of
property the opposing theorists have usually been discussing different
things. Property is the most ambiguous of categories. It covers a
multitude of rights which have nothing in common except that they are
exercised by persons and enforced by the State. {54} Apart from these
formal characteristics, they vary indefinitely in economic character,
in social effect, and in moral justification. They may be conditional
like the grant of patent rights, or absolute like the ownership of
ground rents, terminable like copyright, or permanent like a freehold,
as comprehensive as sovereignty or as restricted as an easement, as
intimate and personal as the ownership of clothes and books, or as
remote and intangible as shares in a gold mine or rubber plantation.
It is idle, therefore, to present a case for or against private
property without specifying the pa