of modern industrialism. And accordingly we live to-day in a world in which neither property nor employment has ever been properly moralized. The bulk of our present social and economic troubles is due very largely to that.
In no matter is this muddled civilization of ours more hopelessly at sixes and sevens than in this matter of the rights and duties of property. Manifestly property is a trust for the community, varying in its responsibilities with the nature of the property. The property one has in one's toothbrush is different from the property one has in ten thousand acres of land; the property one has in a photograph of a friend is different from the property one has in some irreplaceable masterpiece of portraiture. The former one may destroy with a good conscience, but not the latter. At least, so it seems to me.
But opinions vary enormously on these matters because we have never really worked them out. On the one hand, in this matter of property, we have the extreme individualist who declares that a man has an unlimited right to do what he likes with his own—so that a man who owns a coal mine may just burn it out to please himself or spite the world, or raise the price of coal generally—and, on the other hand, we have the extreme communist, who denies all property, and in practice—so far as I can understand his practice—goes on the principle that everything belongs to somebody else or that one is entitled to exercise proprietary rights over everything that does not belong to oneself. I confess that communistic practice is a little difficult to formulate. Between these extremists you can find every variety of idea about what one may do and about what one may not do, with money and credit and property generally.
Is it an offense to gamble? Is it an offense to speculate? Is it an offense to hold fertile fields and not cultivate them? Is it an offense to hold fertile fields and undercultivate them? Is it an offense to use your invested money merely to live pleasantly without working? Is it an offense to spend your money on yourself and refuse your wife more than bare necessities? Is it an offense to spend exorbitant sums that might otherwise go in reproductive investments, to gratify the whims and vanities of your wife? You will find different people answering any of these questions with yes or no. But it cannot be both yes and no. There must be a definable right or wrong upon all these issues.
Almost all the labor trouble in the world springs directly from our lack of an effective detailed moral code about property. The freedom that is claimed for all sorts of property and exercised by all sorts of property to waste or withhold is the clew to that savage resentment which flares out nowadays in every great labor conflict. Labor is a rebel because property is a libertine.
Now this untilled field of conduct, this moral wilderness of the rights and duties and limitations of property, the books of the law in a modern Bible could clear up in the most lucid and satisfying way. I want to get those parts of Deuteronomy and Leviticus written again, more urgently than any other part of the modern Bible. I want to see it at work in the schools and in the law courts.
I admit that it would be a most difficult book to write, and that we should raise controversial storms over every verse. But what an excellent thing to have it out, once for all, with some of these rankling problems! What an excellent thing if we could get together a choice group of representative men—strictly rationed as to paper—and get them to set down clearly and exactly just what classes of property they recognized and what limitations the community was entitled to impose upon each sort.
Every country in the world does impose limitations. In Italy you may not export an ancient work of art, although it is your own. In England you may not maltreat your own dog or cat. In the United States, I am told, you may not use your dollars to buy alcohol. Why should we not make all this classification of property, and the restraints upon each class of property, systematic and world-wide? If we could so moralize the use of property, if we could arrive at a clear idea of just what use an owner could make of his machinery or a financier could make of his credit, would there be much left of the incessant labor conflicts of the present time? For if you will look into it you will find there is hardly ever a labor conflict into which some unsettled question of principle, some unsettled question of the permissible use of property, does not enter as the final and essential dispute.
Editor's Note—This is the third of a series of six articles by Mr. Wells. The next will appear in an early issue.
THE SATURDAY EVENING POST IS fully protected by copyright and nothing that appears in it may be reprinted, either wholly or in part, without special permission. The use of our articles or quotations from them for advertising promotions and stock-selling schemes is never authorized. Table of Contents April 16, 1921 Cover Design by Neysa McMein SHORT STORIES PAGE An Escape to Geneva — Sir Philip Cibbs 8 The Golden Idol— Christine Jope Slade 10 Peachy Walks the Weary — Grace Sartwell Mason 14 The Lily Pond — Thomas Beer 28 ARTICLES The New Business Era — John Moody 6 Tom Shows— L. B. Yates 12 The Salvaging of Civilization — H. G. Wells 16 Currency Crcesuses — Robert Crozier Long 21 Our Country Schools — Forrest Crissey 54 SERIALS Fern Seed (In three parts) — Henry Milner Rideout 3 Miching Mallecho (Second part) — Ben Ames Williams -. . . . 18 DEPARTMENTS Editorials 20 Everybody's Business— Floyd W. Parsons 24 Sense and Nonsense 36 A REQUEST FOR CHANGE OF ADDRESS must reach us at least thirty days before the date of the issue with which it is to take effect. Duplicate copies cannot be sent to replace those undelivered through failure to send such advance notice. Be sure to give your old address as well as the new one.
