ful reward of the owner's service, are indisputably objects of ownership. On the other hand, there are goods and opportunities which cannot be exclusively owned without infringement of just claims which have accrued to others. Thus any of the natural or artificial agencies for controlling the universally necessary means of happiness, such as land in its widest economic sense, acquired science, inventions, accumulated knowledge, methods of organizing capital or labor, may have become available to men as the result of the labor of individuals. Society ought to be willing to err on the side of liberality in providing that such labor shall receive due reward. Our patent and copyright laws are intended to carry out this policy. After the laborer has received his hire, however, the new power over nature which he has found out how to exert should become an addition to the endowment of the race. Again there are results of past and present labor and social combination in which the combined product is vastly greater than the arithmetical sum of the contributions of individuals, and in which the absolute share of individuals is undeterminable. These classes of goods and opportunities cannot be claimed by right as any man's own. They are correctly viewed only when they are regarded as equipments of civilization, which are not primarily for consumption but for production. They cannot be made the absolute possession of individuals without dispossessing other individuals whose ethical claim to some of this social heritage is equally clear. These latter classes of goods are reasonable objects of proprietorship, but not of ownership.
Shall we then conclude that the institution of private property should be abolished? No more than we are to conclude that private individuality should be suppressed. Proudhon taught a doctrine more to be dreaded by the weak and the poor than by the strong and the rich. Our conclusion is that we must keep on learning how to socialize both individuality and possessions. Nor does this conclusion involve toleration of the equally anarchistic assumption that present forms of the institution of property are too sacred to be reshaped. The question, "What may all of us profitable permit some of us to own?" is not closed,
