rticular forms of property to which
reference is made, and the journalist who says that "private property
is the foundation of civilization" agrees with Proudhon, who said it
was theft, in this respect at least that, without further definition,
the words of both are meaningless. Arguments which support or demolish
certain kinds of property may have no application to others;
considerations which are conclusive in one stage of economic
organization may be almost irrelevant in the next. The course of
wisdom is neither to attack private property in general nor to defend
it in general; for things are not similar in quality, merely because
they are identical in name. It is to discriminate between the various
concrete embodiments of what, in itself, is, after all, little more
than an abstraction.

The origin and development of different kinds of proprietary rights is
not material to this discussion. Whatever may have been the historical
process by which they have been established and recognized, the {55}
_rationale_ of private property traditional in England is that which
sees in it the security that each man will reap where he has sown. "If
I despair of enjoying the fruits of labor," said Bentham, repeating
what were in all essentials the arguments of Locke, "I shall only live
from day to day; I shall not undertake labors which will only benefit
my enemies." Property, it is argued, is a moral right, and not merely
a legal right, because it insures that the producer will not be
deprived by violence of the result of his efforts. The period from
which that doctrine was inherited differed from our own in three
obvious, but significant, respects. Property in land and in the simple
capital used in most industries was widely distributed. Before the
rise of capitalist agriculture and capitalist industry, the ownership,
or at any rate the secure and effective occupation, of land and tools
by those who used them, was a condition precedent to effective work in
the field or in the workshop. The forces which threatened property
were the fiscal policy of Governments and in some countries, for
example France, the decaying relics of feudalism. The interference
both of the one and of the other involved the sacrifice of those who
carried on useful labor to those who did not. To resist them was to
protect not only property but industry, which was indissolubly
connected with it. Too often, indeed, resistance was ineffective.
Accust