omed to the misery of the rural proprietor in France, Voltaire
remarked with astonishment that in England the peasant may be rich, and
"does not fear to increase the number of his beasts or to cover his
roof with tiles." And {56} the English Parliamentarians and the French
philosophers who made the inviolability of property rights the center
of their political theory, when they defended those who owned, were
incidentally, if sometimes unintentionally, defending those who
labored. They were protecting the yeoman or the master craftsman or
the merchant from seeing the fruits of his toil squandered by the
hangers-on at St. James or the courtly parasites of Versailles.

In such circumstances the doctrine which found the justification of
private property in the fact that it enabled the industrious man to
reap where he had sown, was not a paradox, but, as far as the mass of
the population was concerned, almost a truism. Property was defended
as the most sacred of rights. But it was defended as a right which was
not only widely exercised, but which was indispensable to the
performance of the active function of providing food and clothing. For
it consisted predominantly of one of two types, land or tools which
were used by the owner for the purpose of production, and personal
possessions which were the necessities or amenities of civilized
existence. The former had its _rationale_ in the fact that the land of
the peasant or the tools of the craftsman were the condition of his
rendering the economic services which society required; the latter
because furniture and clothes are indispensable to a life of decency
and comfort. The proprietary rights--and, of course, they were
numerous--which had their source, not in work, but in predatory force,
were protected from criticism by the wide distribution of some kind
{57} of property among the mass of the population, and in England, at
least, the cruder of them were gradually whittled down. When property
in land and what simple capital existed were generally diffused among
all classes of society, when, in most parts of England, the typical
workman was not a laborer but a peasant or small master, who could
point to the strips which he had plowed or the cloth which he had
woven, when the greater part of the wealth passing at death consisted
of land, household furniture and a stock in trade which was hardly
distinguishable from it, the moral justification of the title to
property wa