Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/589

Rh and it will not be so long as human activities continue to grow complex. From the point of view just defined, civilization is tending neither toward abolition of property nor toward deification of property, but toward discrimination and delimitation of degrees of property. Scholars ought to be most effective agents in promoting this gain. Proudhon was more picturesque than precise when he charged that "property is robbery." It is the scholar's duty to search out the fraction of truth in such wholesale error, to show that some property has been robbery, and to assist in refining principles by which we may guard against permitting any man to call his own what should be partly the franchise of others.

Without attempting to justify it by argument, I suggest one other point of departure for the boundary line between ownership and proprietorship, viz., ownership is possession unlimited by obligation. Proprietorship is possession under bonds for the use of the thing or opportunity possessed as a joint trust with and for others interested. I simply assert that the measure of irresponsibility permitted by our legal and moral codes to owners who should at most be proprietors, is an impeachment of our social intelligence.

The view thus defined is in equal contrast with plutocratic and with socialistic conceptions. The type "proprietor" here contemplated would be neither the plutocratic "owner" of our acquaintance, nor the expropriated ward of the state, into which the present owner is transformed in the socialistic vision. The "proprietor" here contemplated would be a new order of manager-magistrate. He would be created not by state appointment but by industrial selection. He would serve because fit to serve. He would draw pay in accordance with his value to the business. He would have the same relation to the business, after the term of his usefulness had expired, that retired political magistrates now have to the government in a democratic state.

I have thus presented only the syllabus of an argument, none of which is new, but simply newly related. I do not presume