can be divided into separate individual shares only at the cost of incalculable embarrassment to industry. Before the days of machiinery, and aggregated capital, and the application of science to methods of production, no calamity less than war, famine or pestilence could produce equal industrial disturbance. Accordingly the reasons which have been held to make property so sacred are today less simple, their interpretation is less evident, and their relations are different from those which once obtained.
These changes call for revival and enforcement of a radical distinction between classes of claims upon opportunities and things. As was said above, absolute ownership is after all a legal fiction. Our lien upon things which we call our own has recognized limits even in law, and there are still further limits prescribed by justice to every man who has a conscience. But allowing for this accommodation of ideas, it is true that as between man and man there are two classes or degrees of just individual claim upon things and opportunities. I venture to apply to these respectively the terms ownership and proprietorship.[1] Probably there is little usage to support this antithetical use of the words, but for our present purpose I may use the term ownership for the claims that are practically absolute, and proprietorship for claims that have institutionalized limits.
My thesis at this point is that we have brought over, from other social conditions, concessions of rights to ownership which are anomalous aiul dangerous in present conditions. Moreover, if we continue to concede to individuals ownership claims according to present legal rules, there is no escape from gradual retrogression into more abrupt caste separation than ever existed before. I urge, therefore, that the ethical and functional distinction (and I call it ethical because it is functional) between ownership and proprietorship must receive sharper definition, and must
- ↑ The poverty of our vocabulary in this connection is doubtless an evidence of lack of precision in our thought. We have no nouns for the things held under the different tenures which I want this antithesis to represent. If the lawyers had not given the word personally another meaning, I should try to use it for possessions to which right of ownership may he conceded, and the word property would then be left for the less absolute possessions, but even this usage would be arbitrary.
