squatted upon, it will be simply because the results of labor have become connected with it, or the value of other land or other property the products of labor, for the use of which labor competes, are reflected upon it. In 1620 the land upon which the city of Boston stands could have been bought for a string of sea shells; in 1894 its value for assessment as property for taxation was probably in excess of $900,000,000. But in both instances the valuation was determined by one and the same standard: in the first, by the amount of labor required to collect and string the shells; and in the second, by the amount of labor and capital—which is the result of labor—which has been embodied in the land or become connected with it. Take away the labor and its accumulated results, and the site of Boston will be worth no more at the present time than it was in 1628, when William Blackstone first obtained it.
Analyze next the alleged property in bank notes. The coin in the vaults of the bank, the vaults, the building, the books, the furniture, and other physical actualities—the results of labor—employed in transacting the business of banking, are the real property of the bank. The bank stock, so long as the bank exists, is merely a right to receive dividends. The creation of a bank obviously does not create any property. The notes discounted by the bank over its counter are inchoate titles to the debtor's property or to his rights to property; and the notes issued by the bank are inchoate titles to the bank's property or to its equitable rights to property. The bank, apart from its physical actualities and machinery, is simply a ledger recording credits and debits. But credits and debits are only convenient forms of bookkeeping, or the records of transfers of property and of rights, titles, and interests in property pre-existing. Credits and debits, moreover, stand to each other in the relation of an equation. There can be no credit without a debit, and no debit without a credit; strike out one side of the equation, and the other disappears of necessity. If there were no creditors there could be no debtors, and, vice versa, the moment debtors cease to be debtors, that same moment creditors cease to be creditors.[1]
Copyrights and patents are simply legislative enactments to protect pre-existing property. A manuscript, a painting, or an invention is the joint product of physical and intellectual labor, which the copyright or patent right protects, the same as other forms of law protect other visible and tangible property from robbery and spoliation. The relation which these instrumentalities sustain to property is clearly indicated by asking the question, whether there can be such a thing as a patent granted for what has never been reduced to
- ↑ The Supreme Court of Alabama has recently decided that when a bank in that State owns real estate the same is not liable to taxation as a part of its capital stock.
