in an onslaught upon the position of a _noblesse_
which had retained its rights and abdicated its functions. Property
reposed, in short, not merely upon convenience, or the appetite for
gain, but on a moral principle. It was protected not only for the sake
of those who owned, but for the sake of those who worked and of those
for whom their work provided. It was protected, because, without
security for property, wealth could not be produced or the business of
society carried on.

Whatever the future may contain, the past has shown no more excellent
social order than that in which the mass of the people were the masters
of the holdings which they plowed and of the tools with which they
worked, and could boast, with the English freeholder, that "it is a
quietness to a man's mind to live upon his own and to know his heir
certain." With this conception of property and its practical
expression in social institutions those who urge that society should be
{61} organized on the basis of function have no quarrel. It is in
agreement with their own doctrine, since it justifies property by
reference to the services which it enables its owner to perform. All
that they need ask is that it should be carried to its logical
conclusion.

For the argument has evidently more than one edge. If it justifies
certain types of property, it condemns others; and in the conditions of
modern industrial civilization, what it justifies is less than what it
condemns. The truth is, indeed, that this theory of property and the
institutions in which it is embodied have survived into an age in which
the whole structure of society is radically different from that in
which it was formulated, and which made it a valid argument, if not for
all, at least for the most common and characteristic kinds of property.
It is not merely that the ownership of any substantial share in the
national wealth is concentrated to-day in the hands of a few hundred
thousand families, and that at the end of an age which began with an
affirmation of the rights of property, proprietary rights are, in fact,
far from being widely distributed. Nor is it merely that what makes
property insecure to-day is not the arbitrary taxation of
unconstitutional monarchies or the privileges of an idle _noblesse_,
but the insatiable expansion and aggregation of property itself, which
menaces with absorption all property less than the greatest, the small
master, the little shopkeeper, the