More than this, many men of all classes, business men and rich men, as well as theorists and poor men, are beginning to cherish an ambition to assist in so readjusting industrial relations that manhood may be held not less deserving of conservation than property. The only way to save that purpose from deserved ridicule is to discover flaws in the industrial premises which have logically led to despicable conclusions.
I cannot wonder that hard-headed men of affairs have nothing but contempt for those garrulous peddlers of reform programmes who can find no fallacies in the postulates upon which industrial and political administration is based, but declare implacable feud with the consequences of the postulates. Large and satisfying improvement of present social order must wait upon deepening and broadening of the foundations of order. Reforms cannot amount to much so long as they aim principally at details of the finished social edifice.
It is, accordingly, one of the present duties of scholarship to reconsider all that is assumed and involved in the existing institution of property. We must go back to the immemorial perception that human beings cannot live to the best advantage without mutuality. It is one of the conditions of large personal happiness that individuals shall be helped by their fellows to maintain personal claims to things and opportunities, against all encroachment. Conversely, the realization of this condition makes civilization first possible, then progressive. It may come about, however, that the establishment and maintenance of private, personal, possessive rights to things and opportunities, which were appropriate and socially useful in a less complex civilization, may become obstructive and reactionary in a more complex civilization. It is hardly to be doubted that we have reached such a stage in civilization, and that our conditions call for partial reconstruction of the philosophical basis on which the institutions of ownership and property are supposed to rest.
To recall another elementary principle—it is not denied by anybody, so far as I am aware, that ownership is a concession by organized society to persons within the society. Whatever
