Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/585

Rh reservation that rights of exclusive ownership must be compatible with, and tributary to, the general good.

Now, without attempting to draw a final and specific line between things which may be owned and things which the common interest forbids men to hold, except upon certain enforceable terms of use and release, I argue that we have sufficient reason today for beginning to challenge the rationality of the prevailing extension of the concession of ownership.

Let us resort to the homely precept: "It is lawful for a man to do what he will with his own." Let us assume that the proposition is valid, but it raises the preliminary question, "What is one's own?" The answer to that question is not today as clear as it has seemed hitherto.

In the first place some men are surely forgetting that even in the fundamental law of civilized states there is no such idea as absolute ownership by individuals. In theory, approached in practice whenever necessity dictates, the state may impoverish every individual of its membership, to defend national honor and national existence. Not goods alone are thus subject to social draft, but no citizen can call even his life his own when his nation demands his service. The idea of absolute ownership is therefore at best an accommodation.

But while states have grown so secure that the eminent domain and the final ownership of the nation does not ordinarily put onerous limitations upon individual ownership of wealth, personal relations within modern states have so changed that applications of the fiction of ownership have led to anomalous relations between individuals and classes. Men are not only working today with their shop and office mates in a real partnership, but we are working with thousands of thousands whom we have never seen; yes, with thousands of thousands who are no longer living. The legacies of past generations become part of the equipment of the living generation, and we cannot reasonably refuse to consider whether we have allowed certain classes of persons to appropriate more of the heritage of the past than they may justly claim. The equipment with which men work today