this conclusion, namely, that property, at least for the purpose of taxation, is always a physical actuality, with inhering rights or titles, the product solely of labor, and is always measured in respect to value and for exchange by labor.
Thus, for example, a fish free in the ocean is not property; but when it has been caught through the instrumentality of labor it becomes property. Property, furthermore, can not be created except by an application of labor of some kind to material substances, which because they are substances and in order to be substances must have both a corpus, or an entity, and a situs, or a situation. Human labor incorporated in things, and thus saved to those who acquire the things, is also what constitutes value or capital; and nothing can be capital but the existing results of previous labor, which can contribute to man's enjoyment and well-being.
It is interesting also to note in this connection how the etymology of the Latin words possessus and possideo, namely, po and sideo, to sit by or on, and from which in turn we have the English word possession—the common definition of property being something possessed—curiously harmonize with and confirm the conclusion that property must be always a physical actuality. For it is clear that it is only a material something, a visible and tangible entity, that one can sit down on, and not an invisible, intangible nothing, the fiction of law or of the imagination.
A limitation, little recognized by legal writers and authorities, on the exercise of the right of eminent domain (the name given to the power inherent in state sovereignty of making a compulsory purchase of private property for public use), also sustains the correctness of the definition of property as above given; inasmuch as this right is never conceded or made applicable to other than an actuality, and never to a mere representative of something that is not material. Thus one of the illustrations of Roman jurisprudence handed down by Tacitus was to the effect that an emperor was not allowed to appropriate the right to carry a stream of water through the lands of a private individual, but did pay damages for the injuries thereby accruing to the lands.
All investigation on this subject can therefore, it is believed, lead to but one conclusion, and that is that property is always "embodied or accumulated labor." And as political economy does not, and jurisprudence ought not to take cognizance of châteaux en Espagne, these are the only senses in which political economy and the law can legitimately reason about property.[1]
- ↑ The statement is frequently made that all value is the product of labor. Adam Smith says, "Labor is the fund which originally supplies a nation with its wealth." McCulloch says, "Labor is the only source of wealth"; and all the early writers, in one form or
