that this brief will be conclusive. I hope that it will be of some effect in winning assent to the assertion that the postulates concerning property which society is accepting offer points for reconsideration.
To further emphasize this claim, the illustration may be extended to consideration of the probable effect upon certain corollaries of the current conceptions of property, in case anything like the principles of discrimination which I have proposed should be adopted. It would be interesting to trace the logical consequences of such discrimination as effecting the theoretical relations between stockholders and employes. As this subject could not be treated briefly, further illustrations will be confined to the institutions of inheritance and bequest.
Basing my position on the ethics of ownership and proprietorship just posited, I deny that there is any necessary reason for supposing that the privilege of bequest must forever be added to the emoluments of proprietorship. It will doubtless for a long time be expedient to continue the addition of that incident, but it is an addition and by no means an element inherent in proprietorship itself. In other words, nothing which is property merely is to be considered necessarily subject to the bequest of the proprietor, or, in the other case, no man has any natural right to inherit what was only the property of a relative.
This conclusion was contained by implication in the distinction above proposed between ownership and proprietorship. Proprietorship involves service. In one of its elements proprietorship is trusteeship. The legitimate social assumption behind maintenance of the privilege of bequest is that the service supposed to accompany proprietorship will be secured better under the sanctions of bequest, or of prescribed lines of inheritance, than by any available alternative. Thus it is supposed superior utility, not inherent sanctity, which supports these accidents of proprietorship. Bequest is not an essential incident of proprietorship, and Herbert Spencer's attempt to make it such by calling it a "postponed gift " convinces only those who had made up their minds before; because the right
