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 44 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SUCIOLOGY

depend on special circumstances, all legislation should be devised with full regard to the facts of the particular case, so that no real good may be sacrificed by the unwise application of a general principle, however excellent. On the monetary and tariff questions it takes a moderate and conciliatory stand, so far as it takes any at all. In fact, its position on these questions can scarcely be said to be well defined, its sentiments and program varying in different countries and rarely finding unanimous con- currence. Perhaps its dominating tendency may be to favor bimetallism, either national or international, and to advocate import duties in those cases only where a protection of some native industry or industries seem to be of great importance. So far as the writer is aware, however, no very definite Catholic principles are held to be involved in either of these questions. His personal opinion is that international bimetallism and univer- sal free trade would fit in more harmoniously than any rival solutions with the general Catholic world-view.

The Catholic social reformers insist strenuously upon the rights of property, inheritance, and testament. But they do not object to measures by which the owners of utterly unproductive lands may be compelled to develop them, use them, dispose of them, or pay charges which will make good to society the loss it suffers through their neglect. They also contend, in accord- ance with the principles of moral theology, that the man of wealth is under obligations to use a fair share of his income, over and above that which is necessary for the support of his family in a dignity becoming their station, in the betterment of the condition of his poor and needy fellow-creatures. They deny that labor is the sole basis of value ; two factors concur in it, the bounty of nature and the labor of man — the word "labor" including not only physical exertion, but every kind of activity, mental, moral, or physical, expended in the pursuit of useful ends.

Collective ownership and cooperative industry and trade are favored, so far as they are entirely voluntary ; and the title to collective property, even that of a nation, is held to rest on pre- cisely the same basis as that to individual property ; for if the right of private appropriation of property, or of any particular