Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/591

Rh of gift is not properly an incident of proprietorship either. Transfer of possessions from one person to another is socially justifiable only on the presumption that the service belonging with the proprietorship will be equally well performed after the transfer.

If a person appointed as guardian of a child or as receiver of a corporation should venture to delegate his office to another person incompetent to perform its duties, he would be held legally responsible for the mismanagementof his representative. The law rightly makes such transfer of function either a crime or punishable neglect. Now that which is contrary to public policy between living men cannot by legal decree be made entirely satisfactory as the regular order between living persons and the shade of a dead man. If it is contrary to public policy for a father to have liberty while living to put an incompetent son in charge of a business which it is the father's duty to manage, it is also and much more subversive of public interest to establish for that son an owner's right in such management in case of the father's death. The only ground upon which these propositions may be challenged is the presumption that a poor social device is the best possible device; but neither in mechanics nor in civics is limitation of possibility assumable until the limits of experiment have been reached.

In order to show, therefore, the invalidity of the presumptions by which the institutions of bequest and inheritance are buttressed, I call up the perception that ownership of the managerial functions which are essential to the administration of capitalistic enterprise is a concession by society, for which there is plain historical ground, but that ground is not sufficient to justify recognition of such ownership as a natural right. Claim to control of such a function, to the extent of liberty to confer it upon another at will, regardless of his fitness to discharge the function, is as baseless in ethics as the obsolete claim of political classes to the right of conferring political magistracies at will upon relatives and favorites.

The conventional doctrine in the premises would reply to these