s self-evident. It was obviously, what theorists said that
it was, and plain men knew it to be, the labor spent in producing,
acquiring and administering it.

Such property was not a burden upon society, but a condition of its
health and efficiency, and indeed, of its continued existence. To
protect it was to maintain the organization through which public
necessities were supplied. If, as in Tudor England, the peasant was
evicted from his holding to make room for sheep, or crushed, as in
eighteenth century France, by arbitrary taxation and seigneurial dues,
land went out of cultivation and the whole community was short of food.
If the tools of the carpenter or smith were seized, plows were not
repaired or horses shod. Hence, before the rise of a commercial
civilization, it was the mark of statesmanship, alike in the England of
the Tudors and in the France of Henry IV, to cherish the small
property-owner even to the point of offending the great. Popular
sentiment idealized the {58} yeoman--"the Joseph of the country who
keeps the poor from starving"--not merely because he owned property,
but because he worked on it, denounced that "bringing of the livings of
many into the hands of one," which capitalist societies regard with
equanimity as an inevitable, and, apparently, a laudable result of
economic development, cursed the usurer who took advantage of his
neighbor's necessities to live without labor, was shocked by the
callous indifference to public welfare shown by those who "not having
before their eyes either God or the profit and advantage of the realm,
have enclosed with hedges and dykes towns and hamlets," and was
sufficiently powerful to compel Governments to intervene to prevent the
laying of field to field, and the engrossing of looms--to set limits,
in short, to the scale to which property might grow.

When Bacon, who commended Henry VII for protecting the tenant right of
the small farmer, and pleaded in the House of Commons for more drastic
land legislation, wrote "Wealth is like muck. It is not good but if it
be spread," he was expressing in an epigram what was the commonplace of
every writer on politics from Fortescue at the end of the fifteenth
century to Harrington in the middle of the seventeenth. The modern
conservative, who is inclined to take _au pied de la lettre_ the
vigorous argument in which Lord Hugh Cecil denounces the doctrine that
the maintenance of proprietary rights ought to be contin