Typos — p. 14: Wallensetin's [= Wallenstein's]; p.

15: concerend [= concerned];

p. 15: presentday [= present-day]

The Sanctity of Private Property

by
Anthony M. Ludovici

Heath Cranton Limited

London
1932

- p. v -
Preface

The present little work consists of an address delivered by the author to a meeting
of the St. James's Kin of the English Mistery on November 10th, 1931. In view of
the interest which, in these days of high taxation and Communistic propaganda,
attaches to the problem of private property, the members of the English Mistery,
as also the author, hoped that a wider public might be glad of this concise
discussion of the subject, and it was therefore decided to issue it in book form.
The right of private property and the question of its sanctity or profanity
have so long been debated by the two opposing schools of Capitalism and
Communism, and every term and position in the controversy is now so deeply
infected with prejudice, that a brief and impartial review of the history and
philosophy of the subject, together with a suggested solution of the problem of
proprietary rights, based neither on the Capitalist nor on the Communist
standpoint, cannot, it is thought, fail to be of help, if only as a starting point for
the reader's own speculations.

- p. 7 -
The Sanctity of Private Property

1. It would be impossible in the limited space at my disposal to give an adequate

idea of the confusion that prevails in modern thought, modern historical
interpretation and modern anthropological theories, regarding the institution of
private property.
Suffice it to say that, in the course of their enquiry into this institution,
economists and scholars always claim the scientific method as the justification for
their conclusions, and that this method is almost as frequently abused, feigned, or
neglected. A mass of literature has been published on the subject, and three-
quarters of it consists merely of preconceptions and prejudice. The anxiety to
establish the institution of private property upon the solid foundation of a first
principle of life or human nature, upon a natural or divine law, or even upon
irrefutable data concerning origins, has led most investigators astray, and made
them forget that human institutions are all ultimately derived from human taste
and selection, and that as a rule their credit endures only so long as the taste of
their founders is shared or at least approximately equalled by posterity.

2. To deal with the anthropological theories first, we may, for the sake of
brevity, divide them into two, as belonging respectively to the principal hostile
scientific camps — the theory of those who argue from their study of primitive
races that all property was originally communal, and the theory of those who,
- p. 8 -
arguing from more or less the same data, claim, on the contrary, that all property
was originally private. The first regard communism as natural, and private
ownership as a subsequent corruption, while the latter regard the converse as true.
These enquiries of the anthropologists regarding the question of property
have been pursued in accordance with a method that has crept into the science of
economics and sociology, and which consists in the practice of seeking the raison
d'être, and the soundness of modern political or social institutions, or sometimes
even the warrant for them, in the habits, traditions and ceremonies of savages. It
is as if the motive behind such a method were the conviction that whenever an
institution can be found to exist among men in a state of nature, it must possess
some extraordinary quality compelling respect and consideration. It is really an
effort along the lines of evolutionary sociology, having for its object the
establishment of modern sociological principles and laws upon the logic of
unsophisticated humanity surviving in the heart of nature. It is, however, a
romantic or sentimental method of procedure; for interesting as the habits and
ceremonies of savages may be in themselves, they cannot be very helpful to us as
guides in the criticism or elaboration of the rules governing our own society, nor
can they tell us much concerning its evolution.
Nevertheless, countless volumes have been written and are still being written
along these lines. We are surfeited with facts concerning primitive marriage,
primitive religion and primitive morality. But, for our present purpose at least, it
is necessary to record only one achievement that has resulted from all this labour,
which is that both of the old rival schools of anthropology — that which regarded
communal possession and that which regarded private ownership as the original
institutions of mankind — have been proved
- p. 9 -
equally wrong. For the correct verdict turns out to be that the blend of communal
with individual ownership is characteristic of all primitive society and "no
irrational, undifferentiated absorption of the individual in the group can be
discovered."
Naturally the Communists, men like Engels and Marx, seized upon the
evidence in favour of communal possessions in primitive societies, in order to
support their own political aims, while those in favour of a capitalistic order made
an equally one-sided use of the other evidence. But even if one of these — say the
Communists — had found communal possession universally established among
existing primitive races (W. H. R. Rivers on purely scientific grounds actually
championed the view that communal ownership was the primitive form), or
among past primitive races, what would this have proved in favour of establishing
the same order at the present time?
Surely it must soon become evident to our learned sociologists and
economists that the attempt to explain, illustrate, or support our own civilized
institutions by a study of the institutions of existing or past primitive peoples,
cannot fail, quite apart from the sentimental bias behind it, to prove the sorriest
waste of useful energy, because it is always open to the sceptic to ask whether the
fact that these existing primitive peoples have remained at the bottom of the
hierarchy of races may not be due to the very institutions which we study with so
much reverence and humility. In any case, the attempt to base upon such
anthropological data any rule for the observance of modern mankind, or any first
principle on which to build a system, must be unscientific, because, at best, these
data cannot tell more than an incomplete story — the story of the most backward
peoples. They must omit the very earliest history of those races whom we have
known or can know only as civilized or half-civilized.
- p. 10 -
To those whom it may interest, however, let the fact be known for what it is
worth, that nowhere in existing primitive races, or among past primitive races,
has communal possession been found to exist unblended with private ownership
or vice versa.
3. Turning now to the philosophers and their work on the problem of private
property, we encounter much the same striving as among the anthropologists,
though with this difference — that while the latter sought their authority or basis
for one form or the other of ownership in the customs of primitive man, the
former seek for a fundamental law, or an a priori and self-evident principle,
inherent in humanity or human society in general, which makes either communal
possession or private ownership appear to be sacrosanct, or natural and proper to
the animal man.
Regarding at least the early philosophers and legislators, a word of warning
seems to be necessary. Because Europe has been very deeply influenced by them
it is always well to bear in mind, if we can, that, after all, they were first and
foremost townsmen. They had the urban mind, the urban attitude to all things.
Their thought and speculations on this matter of property fit very much more
perfectly the England of to-day than the England of yesterday. In fact, quite apart
from the problem of property, the modern world may never fully understand how
much of its tendency to develop and multiply large urban centres to the sacrifice
of everything else, may not in part be due to the circumstance that, from the very
start, European thought was the thought of men born and bred in city states. This
has tinctured the whole of our philosophy. Could it possibly have failed to be
translated into action?
When Maine said, "It is . . . Roman jurisprudence which, transformed by the
theory of Natural Law,
 - p. 11 -
has bequeathed to the moderns the impression that individual ownership is the
normal state of proprietary right," he had this important fact in mind. At all
events, the urban life of the thinkers and lawyers of Athens, Sparta and Rome, is
more than usually apparent in their treatment of our problem, and we might say
with justice that it was among these men that the notion that the ownership of all
things might be absolute first occurred to the Western World.
And this is more or less comprehensible. For what a townsman handles,
what he is accustomed to hold as his own, is chiefly the kind of property which
may form the object of unconditional or unlimited ownership, or ownership
divorced from duties — the kind of property which English law terms "choses in
possession," such as cattle, clothes, coin, house furniture, carriages, etc., and of
which English law precisely states that they "are the objects of absolute
ownership, that is, of a right of exclusive enjoyment, mainly including the right to
maintain or recover possession of the things against or from all persons, and
further comprehending the right of free use, alteration, or destruction [this last is
important as divorcing the owner of the object entirely from any duty of
obligation to others in connexion with his ownership] and the right of free
alienation, with the corresponding liability to alienation for debt." 1
Now I suggest that it was natural for townsmen, for men bred in city states,
to develop this idea of property, because this was the kind of property with which
they were chiefly concerned. They knew little of any other kind. 2 Had they
known more, they would probably have felt less inclined to extend

1 J. Williams: Principles of the Law of Personal Property.

2 This, on the whole, is more true of the modern Western European townsman than of the
townsman of Athens or Rome; but its partial truth even in regard to the latter, is an important
factor, which is too often overlooked.
- p. 12 -
even to this kind of property the idea of freedom from all social duty or
obligation. And that is why the history of the law and of the ideas on property, in
the ancient world of Greece and Rome, tends to follow this course — gradually to
include in the class of things of which absolute ownership is normal and possible
to the townsman — clothes, trinkets, furniture, ornaments — those things of
which ownership divorced from duty is not, or should not be possible, either to
the townsman or anyone else — the land, the rivers, the lakes, great riches
beyond a man's physical needs, etc.
Thus Maine is able to say with good reason that the history of Roman
Property Law is the history of the assimilation of Res mancipi to Res nec mancipi,
or of things which require a mancipation to things which do not require it.
But this is also the history of English and French Law. Things which could
not without danger become objects of absolute ownership, that is to say free from
all social duties and obligations, like land and riches beyond the individual's
physical and professional needs, have, through the influence of the urban mind,
first of Greece and Rome, and finally of London and Paris, working at the same
problem, become entirely emancipated. But whether London and Paris would
ever have arrived so quickly at the idea of absolute ownership in all things,
without the antecedent influence of Greece and Rome, it is impossible to say. I
venture to doubt it. In any case, France was a little slower than England; for
whereas France, a country which might be supposed to have been more
influenced by Roman Law, recognized rights of absolute ownership in all things
only at the time of the Revolution in 1793, 1 individual ownership in

1 I am not, of course, including the period previous to the Barbarian Invasion, in which, as is
well known, the ownership of the land had become free and personal in Gaul under Roman rule.
- p. 13 -
all things divorced from duties and obligations was finally made possible in
England at the close of the Puritans' all too lengthy spell of power in 1660.
When, therefore, we study the philosophers on this question of private
property, it is well to remember the biassed beginnings of thought on property in
Europe, and to bear in mind through what influence the impression arose that
absolute individual ownership is the normal state of proprietary right.
At all events, it may be admitted at once that, although the right of private
property has been advocated and defended by Western European philosophers
and lawyers from the dawn of history as something self-evident, not one has ever
succeeded in establishing it on a fundamental law or principle of life, morality or
logic, while the attempt to do the same for communal ownership has been even
more hopeless.
There is no a priori truth, no self-evident principle from which the right of
private property can be derived.
But of the various attempts to derive it in this manner, I may mention the
claims of:—

(a) Those who argue that occupation is the origin of private property.
Among these are the Roman lawyers, and thinkers like Kant, Thiers, Lewinski
(the latter writing against Maine), and St. Thomas Aquinas.
(b) Those who point to work or labour as the origin or sanctification of
private property. Foremost among these is Locke and through him the economists
Adam Smith, Ricardo, Say; the Communists, Engels, Karl Marx, Lassalle, Lenin,
Stalin, etc. Spencer and Mill also to some extent held and supported Locke's
view, but with as little intention as Locke himself had of giving arguments to the
Communists.
(c) Those who set up the idea of contract as the origin of private property.
Among these are Hobbes and his followers, including Rousseau and his
followers,
- p. 14 -
together with men like Grotius, Pufendorf, etc. Hume with his idea of an original
"convention" belongs to this group, as does also Kant.
(d) Those who say that law creates private property. Among these, who here
and there necessarily merge into the preceding group, are St. Augustine, Bossuet,
Mirabeau, Tronchet, Robespierre, Montesquieu, Trendelenburg, Hume, Wagner,
Kant, Bentham.
(e) Those who say that the nature of man makes it necessary and useful.
Among these are Roscher, Bentham, Mill — in fact all the Utilitarians. Hume can
be included in this group also. His discussion of the subject, although it reveals,
here and there, startling instances of shallowness, is nevertheless very searching
and reasonable.
(f) Those who claim it as a natural human right. Among these are Blackstone
(to some extent the Roman lawyers and the Catholic Church), Fichte, Portalis,
Professor Ahrens, Daloz, Laveleye, and Herbert Spencer, who, like Kant, bases it
on what he calls "the law of equal freedom." There is, however, no reason to
suppose that Spencer was inspired by Kant. Schiller was also one of these with
his:—

"Etwas muss er sein eigen nennen,

Oder der Mensch wird morden und brennen."
(Wallensetin's Lager, xi)

None of these thinkers, however, except the Utilitarians and those who see
in law and expediency a warrant for private property, makes a very good case.
Most of them, including Locke and his followers, who rest proprietary rights on
labour, end in absurdity, and we find ourselves forced to the conclusion that just
as "private property has meant an immense number of different things at different
times and places," so there are as many solutions of the problem
- p. 15 -
of property as there are kinds of civilization. According to the end we wish to
achieve with man and society, according to the degree of permanence we wish to
secure, so shall we determine the kind of proprietary rights which it is expedient
to grant to individuals, and the establishment of such rights is a matter of taste,
custom and law. But, in exercising taste and judgment in this undertaking, it is as
well to bear constantly in mind that we are children of a long line of people — a
line stretching across two millenniums — who, more or less gratuitously, have
taken individual proprietary rights as self-evident; that, moreover, as we have
seen, the thinkers along this line have been more concerend about finding a
fundamental principle to explain the self-evidence and inviolability of individual
proprietary rights than about justifying them, and that in justifying them — and
justified they must be — presentday thinkers are to some extent treading
absolutely virgin soil.
I have said that it was through no accident that the classical thinkers and
lawyers should gradually have extended the notion of absolute private ownership
(dominium) to all things, even to those things which in their earlier history had
allowed only of the notion of limited, conditional, or usufructuary possession
(possessio). They were townsmen, accustomed to the baubles which a man can
hold without having to give an account of them to anyone.
But there was perhaps less readiness to grant or admit absolute individual
ownership in Greece than in Rome. The compulsory readjustments of wealth and
property in ancient Greece — readjustments which, unlike the Agrarian Laws of
the Gracchi, were successfully maintained — point to this, as do also the
innumerable public services which the wealthy were called upon and expected to
perform. It is perfectly true that the wealthy Romans also performed public
services; but these appear to have been more volun-
- p. l6 -
tary than those of the Greeks, and more regularly prompted by mere ostentation,
while it should always be remembered that they were most conspicuous at a time
when Roman citizens were entirely free from direct taxation (167 B.C. to A.D.
284), a freedom never enjoyed in Athens to the same extent. On the whole, the
general impression obtained from a comparison of the two civilizations is that
private wealth in Greece was regarded as very much more dutiable and accessible
to the public than it was in Rome. Perhaps this may explain why, in Aristotle, we
find a recommendation regarding wealth which reveals a point of view very much
wiser than the later Roman conception of free individual ownership.
In the Politics, Aristotle defends private ownership as being economically
superior (because all men regard more what is their own than what others share
with them in, to which they pay less attention than is incumbent on everyone); as
being a source of pleasure (for it is unspeakable how advantageous it is that a
man should think he has something which he may call his own. . . . Besides, it is
very pleasing to us to oblige and assist our friends and companions, etc.); and as
being more conducive to the development of character (for restraint and liberality
are made possible by it). But he insists repeatedly on the desirability of blending
private and communal ownership. "It is evident then," he concludes, "that it is
best to have property private, but to make the use of it common." There is no
explicit statement that private property when it exceeds certain limits involves
certain duties and obligations, but this meaning can be read into Aristotle's words
without difficulty. There was in Rome little of the feeling that is consonant with
this view of property, and that is probably why Christianity found such a
favourable environment for its teaching in the Roman
- p. 17 -
Empire. The revolt against riches which was already discernible in Stoicism, and
forms so prominent a part of Christian doctrine and the writings of the early
Christian Fathers, was no doubt stimulated by the rigour of the Roman conception
of absolute private ownership in a way in which it would never have been
stimulated by the Greek attitude.
Thought in Europe on the problem of property thus became absorbed in a
negative or hostile attitude to riches as such, before it had had the time or the
opportunity to develop Aristotle's more balanced view. To early Christianity the
institution of private property was not merely unwise, it was actually sinful, and
was classed among the many evil and inevitable consequences of the Fall. Not
only did the early Fathers of the Church regard Communism as the original state
of innocent and blissful mankind, but, as we know, in the early years of the
Church, Christians also practised and advocated Communism. Charity was not
the duty of giving, it was the duty of restoring to the destitute that which was their
own. It was not an act of mercy, but an act of simple justice. St. Thomas Aquinas
actually advocated robbery as a means of relieving destitution. St. Gregory said,
when we give to the poor we render to them that which is their own, we do not
give what is ours. Now although, side by side with these dubious exhortations to
charity, private property was explicitly declared to be a necessary though
regrettable consequence of our fallen condition, nobody can deny that from St.
Gregory's inflammatory utterance to Lenin's cry to the people of St. Petersburg in
April, 1917, "Rob back that which has been robbed," is not a very great step.
And it is significant that this cry of Lenin's also came after a long spell of the
rigorous observance of private ownership in the most absolute and irresponsible
sense.
- p. 18 -
The compromise between the Roman idea of private proprietary rights in the
sense of dominium, and the claims of Christianity, resulted, of course, in charity;
and, apart from the spontaneous growth of Feudalism in Europe, the origin of
which no one precisely knows, and the original designers of which nobody can
name, there has been no attempt since Aristotle first stated the principle, of even
thinking out any practical means, any social structure, through which the
advantages of private property might be preserved while its asperities and gross
abuses were mitigated.
Was it perhaps this thought that caused J. S. Mill to remark: "The principle
of private property has never yet had a fair trial in any country; and less so,
perhaps, in this country than in some others"? If, by this, Mill meant that the
institution of private property has never yet been protected against itself, he
means what I do.
Nor is it any good now, at this late hour, to follow the philosophic method
and try to convince mankind afresh along logical and self-evident lines, of the
desirability of either private property or Communism. For, unless we are prepared
to evolve a system based on Aristotle's principle, by which the right of private
property can be re-wedded to function and duty, and freed from its present
irresponsibility and consequent abuses, unless we can contrive a method by
which property can be enjoyed jointly only in so far as it does not destroy
freedom and character, and privately only in so far as it expresses and preserves
both (and such a system was Feudalism), we shall merely be wasting our time and
hastening the disintegration that threatens.
On the whole, then, it may be said that there is little that has been heard
since Aristotle which improves on his position or which adds to it, and we can
pass over the thinkers and philosophers and turn to history.
- p. 19 -
4. The historical method of enquiry into the problem of private property is
certainly more helpful than the philosophic method, and it is one expressly
advocated by Aristotle. For although we may be seeking for no canon, and are not
prepared, like many modern sociologists, to accept as sacrosanct or respectable
that which primitive people or early societies of mankind have practised, we may,
nevertheless, feel sure that the study of history will at least enable us to see the
different institutions of civilized mankind in the process of working, and to judge
of their viability and worth by the extent of their endurance and the kind of
people and culture with which they were associated.
But, again, in the work of the historians, it is difficult to escape
preconceptions, prejudice and deliberate misrepresentation, and the enquiry has to
be prosecuted with consistent scepticism.
Who, for instance, after reading the Whig histories with which alone we
have been provided for generations in this country, would ever have imagined
that the Puritans, those austere moralists of the seventeenth century, those
scholars of Old Testament lore, and critics of Charles I's finance, sense of honour,
and "oppressive" notions of rule, were the men who, following Calvin, rejected
the Canon Law against usury, and were most eager to be "freed from the efforts
of the King's council to bring home to the employing and mercantile classes their
duty to the community?" 1 But such is indeed the fact.
Who, after reading the histories, both English and French, of the French
Revolution, would ever suspect that this event in France stripped the peasant of
his rights of common, and other secular rights of equal importance, and delivered
him up defenceless into the

1 Archdeacon Cunningham: The Moral Witness of the Church on the Investment of Money,
pp. 25, 26.
- p. 20 -
clutches of the usurers and middlemen, loading him with taxes and forcing him to
enter into competition with people who easily overpowered him? Who could ever
gather from these histories that from 1793 onwards in France, the right of private
property became far more rigorous and absolute than it had ever been?
But such are the facts.
Now the history of the so-called historical period reveals a picture not of
private ownership, nor of Communism, but of a blend of the two, marked by a
hardening of the right of individual ownership as each society approaches its
decadence. In the period of growth and development, when institutions are
flourishing, we never see an enforcement of private ownership in all things, as
was customary in the later period of Rome, and as is customary to-day in Western
Europe and England, but we do find private ownership of some things as an
essential part of the civilization, and this is so whether we turn to Judah, to China,
to Egypt, to Greece, Rome or mediaeval Europe.
The early legislators seem always to have been eager to combine communal
or conditional, with private and absolute ownership, and as fast as the latter form
encroached on the former in each nation, the nearer the civilization approached
disintegration.
An extremely impressive instance of this is to be found in the history of the
Jews. After the return of the exiles from their captivity in Babylon in the sixth
century B.C., and their rebuilding of the Temple, it was found that the community
they formed in Judah, which was nothing but an insignificant little Persian
province, soon developed all the injustices and symptoms of oppression
inseparable from uncontrolled conditions of wealth. Side by side with the
respected families with old traditions, there had grown up a new capitalist class
who lent money to the poorer
- p. 21 -
among the returned exiles, for the purposes of house-building, buying seed and
the payment of the King's tribute; and as security for this they accepted the arable
land, the vineyards and olive-groves of the debtor, and sometimes even the debtor
himself and his children.
In a few years this system led to the existence of a plutocracy on the one
hand, and on the other a wholly dispossessed class, many members of which had
been reduced to the position of serfs.
Now the Israelites, as a people, had always shown the greatest horror of just
such a state of affairs as this. It is explicitly stated in Deuteronomy that no
Israelite should exploit a member of his own community in this way. "Thou shalt
not lend upon usury to thy brother; usury of money, usury of victuals, usury of
anything that is lent upon usury." And there follows the perfectly justifiable
reservation with regard to strangers, in dealing with whom there can be no intra-
herd duties, which implied that usury is not wrong in itself, but only wrong as
against a fellow-citizen. "Unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury; but unto
thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury."
When, therefore, Nehemiah, who was above all a patriot, heard the
lamentations of the oppressed, and saw the kind of social conditions that had been
created in Judah by these people of his own race, who had set out from Babylon
with such pure and lofty intentions, he was very angry, and rebuked the nobles
and the rulers, and "set a great assembly against them." And he commanded them
saying "I pray you let us leave off this usury. Restore, I pray you, unto them even
this day, their lands, their vineyards, their oliveyards and their houses, also the
hundredth part of the money, and of the corn, the wine, and the oil, that ye exact
of them." And they did so.
- p. 22 -
Nehemiah himself set the example, and refused, and made his own servants
refuse, to exact the smallest tribute for any help he had given; and thus the law
triumphed over self-interest, and a sort of redistribution of property was effected
which struck even at the priests, who were made to take an oath to restore
property confiscated for debt, just as the plutocrats had done.
In China the Feudal System lasted under the Chow Dynasty for 866 years
(1122 to 256 B.C.); but as the system degenerated into one of absolute private
ownership, disorder, anarchy and internecine wars occurred, and for the last 500
years of this dynasty China was in a state of complete confusion. Up to the time
of the sixth century B.C. or probably a little earlier (for the process was gradual)
it was impossible for anyone to accumulate unlimited wealth. But the speed with
which similar evils call forth similar remedies, is shown by the fact that no later
than the fifth century B.C., that is to say, about a century after the introduction of
money, and therefore of the means of accumulating wealth, the Chinese were
already recommending the control of capital.
 In Egypt the system was also feudal, but the fact that, from time to time, the
Pharaohs had to intervene in order to buy back from rapacious landlords land that
had become private property, and were obliged to have recourse to a
redistribution, shows that here, too, the tendency of the blend of private and
communal or conditional ownership, to degenerate into purely private ownership,
was regarded as a danger and had to be checked by redistribution.
In Greece we encounter the same dangerous development and the same
remedies. Solon, Pericles, Lycurgus and Agis, each in turn had recourse to
redistribution to try to avert catastrophe, while throughout the history of Athens
we are constantly reminded of the
- p. 23 -
conditional nature of the original proprietary rights and of the sound prejudice
against excessive accumulation, by the innumerable services imposed upon and
expected of the rich. They were expected at great expense to maintain and train
the choruses for festivals and to defray the expenses of other annual "liturgies" or
public services. They were not only subjected to capital levies, but were also
made to serve as trierarchs, which meant that they had to keep a vessel and its
fittings in good repair, and to compensate the State if the vessel was lost or
damaged through negligence. They were, moreover, bound to defray the expense
of the embassies which, from time to time, were despatched to attend some
festival outside Athens, or to consult the oracle.
In this way the Athenian democracy not only financed its national
administration, but also tried to prevent gross accumulations of property in
private hands, and the fact that they succeeded is shown by the nomination of
trierarchs at different periods. At the beginning of the Peloponnesian War the
Athenians were able to nominate 400 men annually, each of whom was rich
enough to maintain one ship for a year, but later on it was possible to find only
couples or whole companies who could meet this charge.
In Rome the development was slightly different. The history of property in
Rome, as I have already pointed out, reveals a steady encroachment of absolute
private ownership upon conditional ownership, or ownership bound up with
duties and obligations, with the consequent accumulation of large fortunes in the
hands of a few irresponsible people, and all the resulting evils of such a
condition. It is true that the bulk of the ultimate private owners of the land had
either descended, or had bought their land, from the possessores, i.e. men who
had only conditional or usufructuary rights granted by the community as a
- p. 24 -
whole. But when the two Gracchi attempted, by their Agrarian Laws, to effect an
equitable redistribution of lands, these mere possessores, who had no rights of
private ownership in the land, protested as if Tiberius and Gaius were
perpetrating an act of robbery; the reforms attempted by these brothers came to
nothing, and by 111 B.C. nearly all the land, which had been public property, had
passed into private hands. And just as England, thanks to the enormous
development of her industries and wealth began to be able, after the sixteenth
century, to support a huge and increasing population of dispossessed people
without too much material hardship, or, at any rate, without enough of it to cause
an upheaval, so Rome, after 167 B.C. was able to abolish the tributum civium
Romanorum, and gradually to complete the conversion of conditional or
communal, into private land tenure, without causing an insurrection among its
despoiled and impoverished citizens, whom it fed and amused gratuitously.
Other small redistributions of land occurred under Cæsar, Nerva and
Septimius Severus, while the last remains of cultivated public lands in Italy were
sold or given away by the Flavian Emperors.
Thus, although the right of absolute ownership appears to have become
universal comparatively early in Rome, vestiges of a system of conditional
ownership survived in a rough and disorganized form. The fact that under the
Republic the city magistrates served without pay, were expected frequently to
devote large sums from their private purses to the celebration of games, and that
State lands were originally occupied and cultivated by merely usufructuary
tenants, while, in the early Empire, individual Romans willingly undertook tasks
(upkeep of public buildings, drainage in and outside the city, the repair of roads,
bridges and harbours) which would other-
- p. 25 -
wise have been a very heavy burden on the public treasury, shows that the
association of private wealth with certain public obligations was an essential
feature of the culture, though perhaps not so marked as it was in Greece.
In mediaeval Europe, the Feudal System gathered up and organized all that
was best in the institutions of the ancient world, relating to property, and evolved
an intricate and decentralized form of administration, consisting of graduated
privileges and obligations extending without a break from the serf to the
presiding monarch. Nothing in any way as desirable had been evolved in Greece
or Rome. It provided leisure for the rulers, with a recognition of the need of that
leisure and of the benefits accruing to the nation as a whole from the possibility
of such leisure. It provided defence and revenue, and allowed for all the
advantages of private property without ever tolerating absolute and irresponsible
ownership in the principal means of production then known, which was the land.
Even the Church lands, themselves, were always supposed to be held in trust for
the poor. The position of the rulers was so far from being a sinecure that they
could be called upon to risk life and limb for the protection of their dependants
and their king, to consult with their dependants and superiors concerning local
and national policy, to administer justice, to guarantee a certain military
contingent adequately armed and equipped, to maintain law and order in their
locality, and to control and perform any number of other duties which made up
the life of an agricultural landlord of the period. In fact, there can hardly be any
doubt that, in its early stages, before the privileges of leadership were well
denned, the duties of the chief or lord under the Feudal System were so heavy
with responsibility that, not only were men reluctant to undertake them
- p. 26 -
(just as in all hierarchies, including the Church, the Army and the Navy to-day,
men are found who decline promotion out of fear of increased responsibility) but
the communities, who wanted chiefs, were also prepared to make substantial
sacrifices in order to lure candidates. Such sacrifices probably consisted of
corvées, willingly performed, so as to secure the chief the necessary leisure; good
quarters urgently pressed upon him, so as to supply him not only with comfort,
but also and principally with suitable accommodation for the discharge of his
many public duties in a dignified and adequate manner; and probably, too,
hereditary rights of chieftainship.
In any case, the final outcome was an organization of property, in which the
form of tenure, by which a thing of value was held, was one of voluntary service,
not intended to be chiefly economic in character, but rather moral and political.
The principle of mutual obligation and loyalty, protection and service, bound
together all ranks of society, from the lowest to the highest; and, while nothing in
the form of irresponsible and absolute individual ownership existed, at least in the
means of production, the right of private property was nevertheless sufficiently
conceded, to lend adequate freedom and dignity to the life of the individual, and
to provide for the adequate development of character.
Not one scrap of that feudal property could be transferred indiscriminately
without the risk of destroying its value — so much so, that every possible
precaution was taken to secure similar individuals to hold it, when any of it
became available through death or some other cause. Contrary to Hume's hasty
assumption concerning the transference of what he termed "external" goods, it
could not be transferred without suffering any loss or alteration unless men
similar to its original holders could be found
- p. 27 -
to take it over. And it was this fact that gave to the lord those powers over the
marriage of heiresses and widows, and over the alienation of property which, to
later generations, have seemed so oppressive and unjust. The fact that Hume, in
the early eighteenth century, was able actually to define "external" property as of
that kind which can be transferred without loss or alteration, is the most
enlightening proof of the change in point of view which had come over England
since the close of the feudal period.
The break up of Feudalism was due to an infinite number of causes, some
avoidable, others unavoidable — at least to the men of the period; but, from our
present point of view, all that we need remark is that the encroachment of
absolute, irresponsible individual ownership upon conditional ownership, or
ownership based upon obligations and duties, marked the process of
disintegration, and that this process of disintegration did not lead, and has not yet
led, to any attempt at reinstating a system of responsible proprietary rights, of
graduated loyalties and obligations, of graduated service and privilege, which, in
Feudalism made the position of the lowest in the land not only as secure but also
as essential as that of his immediate and remotest superior.
The onrush of the new system, the system of irresponsible proprietary rights,
which received so important an impetus from Henry VIII and has lasted until the
present day, was firmly resisted by Elizabeth and Charles I, each of whom took
steps to control capital, to prevent it from accumulating in a few hands, and to
impose upon the new, independent rich certain duties towards the community. In
fact Charles I may be said to have sacrificed his head in the prosecution of these
three aims. But in favour
- p. 28 -
of the new order, promoting and defending it, were too many liberated human
passions, too many powerful and venal motives; and ultimately, behind the
imposing facade of religious fervour, and an alleged deep concern for the liberties
of the People, the party in favour of laisser-faire — for that is what it amounted
to — won the day. With rapid strides, the foundations of the present capitalistic
system were completed, and in the few years that separated the Long Parliament's
struggle with Charles I for a free hand, and the passing of one or two statutes in
Charles II's reign, which extended the capitalists' policy to the land, the new era
was successfully launched.
From that day there remained but two possible means of attaching social
obligations to property — taxation, which is merely expropriation, has no bearing
on character, loyalty and honour, and fails to functionalize privilege and property;
1
and charity, which was always indiscriminate, which owing to the necessity, or
the tradition, of urging it by appeals to pity, was always directed to the support
and promotion of the most degenerate and least desirable elements in the nation,
and which, with the prevailing anarchy in the administration and testamentary
disposal of property, was bound to lead to a hopeless squandering of the national
wealth (particularly by women) on the most unwise foundations and institutions.
This failure displayed by later usages and institutions to attach to rank and
privilege a corresponding obligation and function, while at the same time they
hardened the right of individual ownership and resolutely universalized the
"external" goods that

1 Certain services, of course, did remain, which, although not legally exigible, were
nevertheless loyally rendered by the bulk of the English propertied class. I refer to the work of
magistrates, the participation in politics, etc., though these duties were probably undertaken from
motives more often of self-protection than of patriotism. For evidence of this, see my Defence of
Aristocracy.
- p. 29 -
could be owned, constitutes one of the most distressing and perplexing features of
the modern Age. For the absoluteness of private ownership in everything led, in
modern Capitalism, to consequences that ought to have been foreseen and
guarded against — the accumulation of vast wealth in a few hands,
irresponsibility in the administration and the testamentary disposal of that wealth,
a huge body of dispossessed, who are often deprived, in a society approving of
private ownership on moral grounds, of the benefits of private ownership, and a
commercial and industrial regimen of these dispossessed, which is almost always
anonymous and unseen (the French logically call Limited Liability Companies,
Sociétés anonymes). Now the frantic efforts to save Capitalism by recourse to
indiscriminate confiscation in the form of heavy taxation, and by sentimentality
in the form of indiscriminate charity, fails, and must fail, because such methods
have no organizing power, are quite anonymous or impersonal, do nothing to knit
the various strata of the nation together, and are, moreover, wasteful and
mischievous. For while indiscriminate taxation does not guard against the
possibility of seriously depreciating or even destroying property by here and there
removing it from owners who administer it exceptionally well; charity, which
deliberately shuts out all thought of the farmer's attitude to the weeds in his
precious crop, stands for sacrifice to the cripples, mental defectives, incurables,
lunatics and degenerates of all kinds, as if this were necessarily good and
desirable, and good not only for the nation as a whole, but also for the individual,
whose passport into society almost depends upon the amount of iodoform-laden
air he has recently inhaled.

5. From this brief sketch of history we seem justified in concluding:

- p. 30 -
That great civilizations and great peoples have without exception been
observers of the right of private ownership.
That everywhere this right has been to some extent limited, particularly in
regard to the land.
That the cupidity, acquisitiveness and short-sightedness of man tends
gradually in weak societies to convert any form of conditional ownership, or
ownership bound up with duties, into private and absolute ownership, and that
this is always a sign of political decay.
That wherever and whenever absolute private ownership has been extended
to every possible form of goods, or property, and has led to the accumulation of
vast fortunes in a few hands, and the creation of a class wholly dispossessed and
dependent in a wholly non-functional way, disintegration has always threatened.
That at such moments of crisis, the efforts of ancient legislators —
Nehemiah, Solon, Pericles, Lycurgus, Agis, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, to
mention only a few — have always been to avert disaster by trying to restore to
the majority those very benefits, which are the sole basis for the persistence of
individual ownership as an institution.
That the grand experiment of mediaeval Europe in the art of combining all
the privileges of private ownership with those of conditional ownership and duty,
and of organizing the two on a basis of graduated rank and responsibility, mutual
loyalty and obligation, must seem to us rather like a reaction after the long spell
of "free" proprietorship which spread throughout the Roman Empire as the result
of Roman Law, and at the same time as a development of some of the hardest
lessons learned by the man of antiquity.
That in the comparatively recent system called Capitalism, in which the
irresponsible administration
- p. 31 -
of wealth, combined with large accumulations of it in a few hands, is
accompanied by the existence of a vast multitude of disinherited or destitute
people, we find the recurrence of abuses and errors, which are leading to a fresh
crisis, in the anticipation of which the masses are again being taught both by
doctrinaires and circumstances, to call the institution of private property in
question.
Finally, that after each phase of universalized private ownership and
irresponsibility there has followed a reaction in which the very right of private
property has been put in question, and that in its purely social and political
aspects Christianity was merely one of these reactions.
Thus Capitalism and Communism are now at each other's throats, in both the
international and intranational sense.
Capitalism is a condition in which the best administrator of property in
excess of a man's physical and professional needs, and the best testamentary
disposer of such property, is assumed to be the person who happens
adventitiously to be in possession of it.
This is nonsense.
Communism is a condition in which the best administrator of property is
assumed to be the central Government.
This also is nonsense.
These two forms of nonsense are now at death grips. It behoves us, if we
wish to save our civilization, to find a way out of this absurd duel between these
two forms of nonsense, and in order to do this we must be quite clear regarding
what is happening.
Against the increasing burdens of taxation, which is really expropriation and
therefore partial Communism, it is no longer any good trying to harden the right
of private property either philosophically or legally; because it is precisely the
hardening of
- p. 32 -
the right of individual ownership that has provoked expropriation and partial
Communism.
Furthermore, against the claims of Communism it is no good for the
Capitalists with their hands on their hearts to claim that there is anything divine
or fundamentally sacred about the right of private property, because it must be
evident, without further enquiry, that if the definition of capitalism given above is
even approximately just and fair, there must be an enormous deal in the present
institution of private property which is both foul and indefensible.
On the other hand, it is no good for Communists to reply to the claims of the
Capitalists that they hold a panacea for all the world's ills. For, in this matter, as
in others, the wise man, as Aristotle insists, will turn to experience. He will
truthfully assert that he knows of no single instance of communal ownership
having either created a great culture or people, or endured in a great culture or
people.
Even to the plea that Communism has never been tried and that to condemn
it untried is philosophically unsound, the wise man, without referring to the
monstrous fraud of Russian Communism, can reply that, on the contrary, it has
been tried again and again, that it actually exists in a more or less modified form
to-day, in a number of backward races, and that it is quite impossible entirely to
separate their backwardness and their settled inferiority in the hierarchy of races,
from the social principles by which they govern their lives. He can reply more or
less as Aristotle did to Plato, that wherever he sees the principle of Communism
applied, in Government offices and works, and in public services, in every
country, no matter how highly civilized, he sees waste, inefficiency, daily and
hourly robbery of the national exchequer, persistent extravagance of the most
- p. 33 -
illusive and most undiscoverable kind, gross overlapping of duties, unnecessary
multiplication of staffs, and above all chronic dereliction of duty in all ranks and
departments.
But this absurd controversy between these two forms of nonsense,
Capitalism and Communism, has already led to terrible bloodshed — it is
unfortunately chiefly over nonsense that blood is shed — and is likely to do so
again, and all to no purpose. Because, whichever side wins, the result is bound to
be the re-enthronement of some tragic piece of buffoonery.

6. What then should be the attitude of the modern thinking man towards this
ridiculous controversy? It is no longer either good policy or good humanity to
rely on the trial and error method or on blind chance or emotion for the solution
of this problem. We cannot afford at this stage in our evolution to be unconscious
to the extent of becoming again the sport of circumstances. All too clearly we
have seen the consequences of past generations having allowed themselves
unconsciously to drift from one institution to another, and, in the case of
Feudalism, from one good institution into a bad institution, to rely any longer on
this process of blind and automatic adjustment. If we feel in the least entitled to
regard ourselves as adults in the historical sense, it is surely time that we became
perfectly conscious and directed our footsteps on a conscious plane.
For reasons that have been explained, the philosophers do not help us much.
Too anxious to establish the axiomatic nature of the right of private property, they
have given us no guidance, no criterion by which we can determine its sanctity, if
such it ever can have. They have not helped us to distinguish between private
property that is sacred and private property that is profane. And yet upon this
- p. 34 -
distinction the conscious modification of our institutions must turn.
First of all, following Aristotle, let us see what there is to be said for private
ownership. Past experience and the common verdict of mankind points to private
ownership as a desirable institution for the following reasons:
(a) It is the first pre-requisite of individual freedom, both in the detailed and
wider sense. (You cannot be free if you have to share one pair of boots with
another man, as Lenin and Trotsky once had to do during their exile in Paris. You
cannot be free if the overseer of a Communistic State determines your occupation
for you. You cannot be free if you do not possess the instruments, or tools of the
craft you wish to practise. In the wider sense, you cannot be free, i.e. at liberty to
exchange a bondage incompatible with your highest impulses, for a bondage that
harmonizes with them 1 — unless you can choose your road, your path. And
Communism could not fairly allow you to do this.)
(b) It is the first pre-requisite for the exercise and development of taste.
(Taste is discrimination in choice, and you cannot choose unless you can
command circumstances. This you cannot do without a modicum of
independence secured by private property.)
(c) It is the first pre-requisite in the formation of character and the practice of
self-discipline. (Some liberty of action, some power of arranging one's own life,
and some certainty that one will enjoy the consequences of one's arrangement, are
essential to the moulding of character, and this liberty and power presuppose
some lasting control of material circumstances. In the same manner, some
experience of the regrettable results of a wrong arrangement, some

1 A full explanation of this antithesis will be found in my False Assumptions of Democracy

(Heath Cranton, 1921, Chapter IV).
- p. 35 -
control over self to avoid these results, are necessary to self-discipline. This, I
suggest, explains the high achievements in human, spiritual and material products
of those peoples who have held private ownership to be a right.)
(d) It is essential for purposeful leisure. 1 (Purposeful leisure, being the
means of creative thought, is in itself a creation of private property. Against this it
may be argued that imprisonment, too, provides leisure, and, in the case of men
like Raleigh, Bunyan, Cervantes and Oscar Wilde, productive leisure. This
objection, however, cannot be meant seriously. The fact of being incarcerated
imposes certain unchosen conditions even upon the man who requires only a pen
and paper; it limits choice in the use of purposeful leisure, and even in the case of
literary production, which is the chief use to which prison leisure can be put,
requires a certain minimum age limit, beneath which the experience of life
necessary for useful writing can hardly be expected.)
(e) The less important but fairly obvious features of private property, which
make it desirable are. (1) It is economically superior (communal undertakings, as
already pointed out, tend to become "circumlocutionary"). (2) It promotes and
preserves the nobler side in human nature — generosity, hospitality, patronage.
(3) It is pleasurable. (To the best average natures, it is more pleasurable to be
independent, self-supporting and free, than to be dependent, parasitical and
fettered. It is not everyone whose artistic inspiration can ennoble, or make

1 In a society attaching responsibilities to wealth, there may be men who wish to escape
these responsibilities in order to use leisure for the solution of problems not connected with the
active life about them — chemical, biological, historical research, metaphysics, literature, etc.
But, in that case, they should be expected, as in Feudal times, to make a voluntary renunciation of
wealth — hence the creative work done by monks. This, however, would imply the existence of
suitable institutions for their reception.
- p. 36 -
him forget, a state of parasitism.) (4) To the man of average intellect and to the
classes beneath him, it is a very important condition of energetic and ambitious
activity. (Not every one can live so completely in the spirit as to be indifferent to
material rewards.)
But against this catalogue of virtues, there is a very long list of objections.
 (a) Private property makes acquisitiveness, cupidity, greed and rapacity
possible, and, as all these infirmities are human, all-too-human, they cannot be
conjured away merely by a profound Liberal or Socialist faith in the essential
goodness of mankind.
(b) Through (a) private property tends to accumulate in a few hands, and
does not necessarily collect where virtue or human desirability is most
conspicuous.
(c) Having accumulated, it is frequently unwisely, viciously administered,
and unwisely and mischievously bequeathed after death, under the very eyes of
the disinherited.
(d) It is also used to desecrate the sacred possession of leisure. The vulgar
and all those who, being slaves by nature, cannot be their own masters, make
leisure appear ridiculous and purposeless, and bring it into contempt under the
very eyes of the disinherited.
(e) As an institution it tends gradually to harden the sense of possession, so
that in time people forget the contribution made by all to their individual
property.
(f) In capitalistic societies it can be acquired in vast quantities in so many
ways that have no connexion with either diligence, good taste, great intellectual
gifts, good health, patriotism or even common honesty, that it is often profane
before it reaches the hands of its owner. (Profits on stock and share transactions,
on valuta transactions, on forward buying of commodities or currencies, on the
cornering of markets, and
- p. 37 -
speculative deals of various kinds, not accruing to the advantage of the
community at large — all of which transactions can be carried through quite
successfully by a gangrenous, bedridden cripple at one end of a telephone.)
(g) In capitalistic societies, moreover, it is divorced from any function or
sense of duty, so that it becomes a right without a function or duty, which is
absurd.
(h) In capitalistic societies it also leads to the exercise of an anonymous,
inhuman power over one's fellows. Power over men is not necessarily bad, as it is
too often assumed to be. But the fact that it may be bad, and that in capitalistic
societies there is no means of tracing where it is bad and where it is good, makes
Capitalism peculiarly nonsensical and vulnerable. (The spectacle of a degenerate,
overfed cripple being carried about in a litter all day, year in, year out, by six
stalwart, able-bodied and wholesome men who sacrifice their best to him, would
be nauseating enough as an exception; but the very justifiable suspicion that
under the capitalistic regime it may in an occult form be almost the rule, makes
Capitalism intolerable to all those who can only acquiesce in the power of man
over man, when both the subordinate and the community as a whole benefit from
the relationship.)
It is no remedy of these vices to retain a central Government and to continue,
or to extend, the expropriation of private property indiscriminately by means of
taxes, rates and exhortations to charity. You might just as well try to rid the
population of its plethoric individuals by bleeding the whole nation. Besides all
such methods are merely half-hearted concessions to Communism and indicate a
confusion of two principles.
It is not generally realized that just as Louis XIV, by his centralisation of the
government of France,
- p. 38 -
defunctionalized his noble sand prepared the block on which they were to be
beheaded, so centralized government in this country has made the
functionalization of independent riches impossible, and is preparing the rich for
the axe of Communism.
Nor is it enough vaguely to demand the control of capital as the Chinese did
over two thousand years ago. Because by control, the modern world would
understand Parliamentary control by means of restrictive or Puritanical
legislation, so that all that would happen would be the continuation of the status
quo ante, plus certain additional penalties and constraints imposed
indiscriminately on all capitalists. For instance, accumulations beyond a certain
figure might be prohibited, and certain irresponsible methods of earning or
bequeathing property might be stopped.
But this would be leaving things as bad as ever. Because wealth, even very
great wealth, in certain hands may be extremely desirable. Power is not bad in
itself. It only becomes bad if it is indiscriminately granted.
It seems to me, therefore, that the time has come, when some discrimination
should and must be exercised regarding this matter of society's acquiescence in
the retention of power. Society has achieved the curtailment of power by rough
and sweeping methods in the past, and we have seen kings and hereditary
legislators stripped of their prerogatives. But never since the Feudal System has
there been any attempt to discriminate between which of two men, of the same
claims and rank, should be allowed to seize power. And yet it is precisely the
curse of sweeping and indiscriminate limitations and restrictions, that they must
necessarily deprive humanity of an enormous amount of valuable guidance and
service, because they are always based upon measures calculated to rule out the
worst type, without retaining the best.
- p. 39 -
But in order to discriminate, we must have some criterion of worth.
For there is no longer any time to lose. The institution of private property is
being assailed on all sides, and if those who have the greatest interest in
defending and maintaining it do not set to and purge it of its foulness, its abuses,
and its absurdities, this task will be undertaken very much more brutally and
vandalistically by their opponents. But if we are ever to speak of and recognize
such a thing as sacred property — that is to say, property that no one would dare,
without the risk of committing sacrilege, to take from its owner, — how are we to
distinguish it from that which is profane? What shall be our test?
We have seen that there is nothing either in history or philosophy to justify
our calling any property in excess of the individual's physical and professional
needs sacred at all. It is by a mere fiction of law and habit that it ever acquired
any odour of sanctity. On the other hand, no thinking man would ever deny that it
may be sacrosanct. How are we to tell? How could any tribunal tell?
The test of how it was acquired cannot always be relied upon. Because,
whereas he may acquire it honestly or even diligently, and in a way not injurious
to the public, its owner may administer it badly.
The quantitative test is also useless. Because to attempt to set a limit to the
actual amount a man may possess, as many legislators have done in the past, and
to confiscate the balance, is to assume that no man can be a good administrator of
property over a certain amount — obviously a daring and unjustifiable
assumption.
St. Augustine, followed by Wyclif, suggested that the test should be the
quality of administration, and that a bad administrator should be separated from
- p. 40 -
his wealth. The qualification for continued possession ought, therefore, to be
good administration.
Hume, taking up this argument, agreed that for a wise and just man to
restore a fortune to a miser or a seditious bigot was a just and laudable act, but
that the public was the sufferer. Being desirous above all to defend the sanctity of
private property as such, however, he refused to allow isolated cases of this kind
to weigh with him. "Though in one instance," he said, "the public be a sufferer,
this momentary ill is amply compensated by the steady prosecution of the rule,
and by the peace and order, which it establishes in society."
But Hume had not reached our present position. He was not faced, as we are,
with the alternative of justifying private ownership and of cleansing it of its
foulness, or of losing it as an institution.
It seems to me imperative, now, that St. Augustine's test should be ruthlessly
applied, and that if private property is to be controlled at all, this should be a
factor in the method of controlling it. But as a test is it clear enough? Is it proof
against looseness of interpretation?
I venture to doubt it. But whereas it may be difficult to determine the quality
of administration precisely it cannot be as difficult to determine the value of
property in a given community. Surely, however, if we may suppose it to be
always possible to determine the value of property in a given community, it must
also be possible to compute the loss or gain that a certain lot of property would
register by the mere act of transferring it from one owner to another. It is the
direst nonsense to suppose that property does not either suffer a loss or register a
gain by being transferred. The policy of taxation and confiscation is built on this
nonsense, and it is curious to find a philosopher as perspicacious as Hume
- p. 41 -
generally is denying that it is nonsense, in fact definitely stating that the
characteristic of what he terms "external" goods, is that they can be transferred
without suffering any loss or alteration. Truth to tell, in view of the infinite
diversity of men, the transference of property without actual loss or gain to that
property is inconceivable. To take two extreme and obvious examples of what is
meant, let us suppose the transfer of two kinds of goods — a child's toy and a
wise man's fortune. Now if the first is transferred to an adult it is obvious that its
whole value will be wiped out at one stroke. Even to transfer it to a child less
imaginative and less resourceful than its first owner, will lead to an appreciable
decline in value, which is surely capable of being registered. On the same
principle, if the wise man's fortune be transferred to a gambler or drunkard, or
even to a less wise owner than the first, its value must depreciate, and, what is
more, culminate in a loss to the community at large.
Clearly then, the crucial test of whether property in excess of a man's
physical and professional needs is sacred or profane, should be to discover
whether its removal from him will involve irreparable loss or actual gain to the
property itself and ultimately to the community. And, according to this, we
should conclude that nothing a man owns, beyond his physical and professional
needs, is really sacred property unless its removal from him involves such
irreparable loss.
Thus, in a properly organized community, the fundamental difference
between the poor and the rich would be that, whereas the poor are not equipped to
hold sacred property, the rich are so equipped.
In a healthy state, only those should be poor from whom property can be
removed without either loss to the property itself or to the community.
- p. 42 -
On the same principle, the rich should be those from whom property cannot
be removed without loss both to the value of the property and to the community.
To-day, however, there is no such differentiation. Not only the Communists
and Socialists, but everybody knows that in ninety-nine per cent of cases the poor
could now take over the incomes of thousands of the rich without any appreciable
loss to anything or anybody, except the individuals despoiled.
Thus the task of the future is undoubtedly to elevate the institution of private
ownership above present day standards, to create a wealthy class whose property,
over and above their physical needs would really be sacred according to the
definition given above, and therefore to make it as difficult and onerous to be
rich, as in the best days of Feudalism it was difficult and onerous to be a leader.
This task will hardly be accomplished unless we can solve the problem of
organizing society once more upon a basis of mutual loyalty and obligation, of
duty and responsibility bound up with benefit, so that from the lowest to the
highest in the land, everyone is in a position of honour, security and service. But,
apart from suggesting that, in order to achieve this end, Government will have to
be decentralized and much of the freedom and absoluteness now traditionally
associated with private ownership will have to be abolished along lines utterly at
variance with Communism and Socialism, the problem is really beyond the scope
of this essay.

7. Nevertheless, since to drop the subject at this point may leave many
readers wondering how the above criterion and test of proprietary right is to be
applied in practice, perhaps a brief outline of its possible practical application
may not be without interest.
 - p. 43 -
If the proof of proprietary right lies in the irreparable loss that would accrue
both to the community and to the property itself, by the removal of the latter from
its owner, it is obvious, in the first place, that some sort of tribunal would have to
be constituted to examine the question of transfer and to decide it. There would
be no need of a central tribunal. Though its constitution would everywhere be the
same, it might be repeated any number of times all over the country.
As to the constitution of the tribunal, the history of human institutions does
not leave us in any doubt. From our knowledge of all corporations and bodies of
men, who have a certain reputation, a certain standard of service, and certain
common interests to maintain and protect, it is clear that those most ready
jealously to guard the prestige and standards of an order are usually the men who
belong to it. There are exceptions to this rule, the most conspicuous being the
body represented by the peers of England. But, generally speaking, except where
great stupidity and blindness have operated as obstacles, the rule is usually
observed. This is seen in the merchant and trade Guilds of the Middle Ages.
Members of these Guilds exercised vigilance over their fellow-members in order
to maintain both the prestige of the body and the quality of its service. A similar
vigilance on a much higher plane was also exercised by the Council of Ten in
Venice, which by ensuring the proper discipline of that body, and by insisting on
a certain standard of performance among the Venetian aristocracy, was
undoubtedly largely responsible for the exceptionally long endurance of that
aristocracy's rule. Had the English aristocracy, as I have already pointed out, 1
possessed a Watch Committee in any way resembling the Venetian

1 See my Defence of Aristocracy, Chapter VIII.

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Council of Ten, it is most improbable that it would ever have sunk to its present
position of impotence and insignificance in the legislature of the country, or could
have sunk so quickly. And, in this respect, the peers of England seem
traditionally to have been incapable of the most elementary measures for their
self-preservation. Severity in punishing those of their class who failed in noblesse
oblige, and ruthlessness in ejecting from it any who brought discredit upon the
class as a whole, or who failed even to reach a necessarily high standard of
service and conduct, would undoubtedly have served the aristocracy of England
in very good stead, and for the lack of a body that could exercise either, they have
sunk to the level of mere titled capitalists.
Within the Church, the legal and the medical professions, and in such
services as the Army and the Navy, we find tribunals in existence for checking or
eliminating undesirable elements in the system, and we find these tribunals
consisting not of a state-paid judge and a jury, but of members of the body
concerned; because they know best how the prestige and power of their
corporation are to be maintained.
Difficult, therefore, as the problem will undoubtedly be, it nevertheless
seems to me inevitable that, if personal wealth, in the sense of free private
ownership of property beyond physical and professional needs, is to be
maintained as an institution, the wealthy themselves, who are those chiefly
concerned about maintaining its prestige and power, will have to constitute the
tribunal entrusted with exercising the disciplinary functions within the order. And
since it must be either this, or Communism, it seems ridiculous to argue that the
thing is not practicable. It is as practicable as anything is practicable that is really
and earnestly desired. In any case, it cannot be argued that it is any less
practicable than the
- p. 45 -
Council of Ten. It needs only courage and determination. If, however, the rich
approach the matter with the firm, middle-class resolve of having nothing
whatsoever to do with any undertaking that promises to be in the least bit
unpleasant, if they feel themselves constitutionally and mentally incapable of
ruling out of their order, by their own deliberate act, a man or woman who was
yesterday playing golf with them, or hunting with them, simply because
perchance he or she is such a pleasant person and has not been guilty of a sexual
crime, or anything really shameful from the sex-phobia standpoint, then it seems
to me that their case is hopeless, and they can only do what the Lords did during
the nineteenth century — await their gradual demise with calm and resignation.
If, on the other hand, they appreciate the gravity of the alternative, and the
inevitability of its advent should matters be allowed to drift, it seems as if there
were yet time to save the institution of private property, more particularly as
those who undertake this task will have the whole world of small possessors,
down to the man whose only wealth is a gold watch, to support them.
So much for the tribunal.
As regards the circumstances which will call for an examination of any
claim to proprietary right, and the lines along which such an examination should
be prosecuted, this is a matter of a new organization and new values. Almost all
that can be said about it has already been said in the previous section. In the first
place, in order to functionalize the wealthy once more, it will be necessary to
decentralize much of the present government administration, and also to suppress
a number of public services now financed and administered from one centre. All
normal transfers of property brought about by death or gift
- p. 46 -
will also have to be subject to examination by the competent tribunal, irrespective
of whether the previous owner had or had not maintained the standards of his
order. A transvaluation of values would quickly follow any such changes; but a
transvaluation of values as a first step would also very greatly expedite them, and
among the values to be transvalued — really a simple matter in these days of the
Press and the wireless, when few know how constantly their values are being
transvalued for them — are chiefly those relating to wealth and its prestige.
From being honourable only as an end in itself, wealth should become
honourable merely as a means. From being only a quantitative distinction, it
should become a qualitative one. From being a path merely to pleasure and
ostentation, it should become a path to responsibility and difficulty. And, finally,
from being a weapon for eccentricity and unrelatedness, it should become an
instrument of order, normality, and relatedness.
Again, in regard to these reforms and changes, to argue that they are
impracticable is to be blind to what is already taking place at the present moment.
If we are now able to record innumerable examples of disintegration as having
recently taken place not only in the constitution of the Empire, but also in that of
Great Britain itself, this means that a natural, unconscious, uncontrolled and
haphazard process of decentralization is already in operation merely as the result
of a policy of drift. It only requires a policy of conscious, deliberate and
thoughtful control, therefore, to turn this process of disintegration, or haphazard
decentralization, into one of conscious and ordered decentralization.
Nor would a new principle be introduced by the suggested examination of
all normal transfers of property, seeing that the machinery for acquiring
- p. 47 -
the information is already working, and the incidence of death duties already acts
(indiscriminately it is true) in diverting a large proportion of wealth thus normally
transferred from the legatee intended by the testator to some other destination not
intended by the testator.
The examination of wealthy people suspected of having failed to attain to
the required standards, or proved to have thus failed, would introduce an
apparently new principle; but this, too, is anticipated by innumerable customs and
practices that have operated in the past, and still continue to operate in certain
parts of the world, relating especially to the conditions of efficiency imposed on
certain owners of agricultural land. 1
In regard to the transvaluation of values also, we can see the machinery for
effecting this at work every day, and can appreciate its results in a thousand and
one changes in purely standardized opinions. It would be unreasonable, therefore,
to argue that a transvaluation of values is impracticable. All that is needed is to
get conscious and ordered control of the machinery available for the purpose,
instead of leaving it, as it is left to-day, to the mercy of every chance influence
and power that happens for a moment to turn the wheels.
It cannot be said that the human material in youth and brains is lacking for
carrying through these reforms and making a success of them, if, that is to say,
their success is really regarded as important; for I know of a political movement
already on foot,

1 A practice not unlike the forcible transfer of property suggested here also existed in ancient
Athens. If a man felt he had been unjustifiably called upon to take a liturgy, he could appeal and
suggest a richer man as a substitute. If the latter refused to undertake the obligation, the first man
could challenge him to change fortunes, implying that with the substitute's fortune he would be in
a position to shoulder the burden.
- p. 48 -
which is undoubtedly committed to decentralization as opposed to disintegration,
and to the conscious and deliberate transvaluation of values as opposed to the
haphazard transformation of standardized opinion which is now practised by
Fleet Street, the films, the wireless and modern literature.
 It is idle, therefore, for the possessors of wealth to-day any longer to cry
"Impossible!" to recommendations of this nature, even if the present
recommendations prove unacceptable. Nor can they indefinitely put off the day,
hoping merely to prolong the status quo until at least the end of their own or their
children's generation. For the danger is imminent, and the alternative policy of
Communism and high taxation, is already so firmly entrenched that time can only
help to establish it.
If private property as an institution is worth saving at all, if the advantages it
presents are as great as I have claimed, and if there is such a thing as the sanctity
of private property which is to be found in the conditions I have described, then it
seems to me that unless those who are in possession of wealth to-day are cynical
enough to cry, "Après nous le déluge!" and unless they are too listless or
masochistic to care what happens to them, they will be bound, in order to save the
institution and their class, to purge both of the foulness they undoubtedly contain,
and to set up some kind of machinery that will prevent them from becoming
polluted in the future.