Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/579

Rh closeness in the direct relations of person with person. This fact is particularly apparent in the relationships which involve property. The primitive idea of property was so associated with the fact of possession or occupation that it could not be entertained apart from that. According to the earlier Roman law, stolen property was lost to its owner, simply because he had lost possession, without which the moral intelligence of that age could not retain its conception of the right of property. If recovered from the thief, it was appropriated by the state. In the later Roman jurisprudence this inequity was corrected, but it reappeared in the legislation of the barbarian conquerors of the empire, and again became the law of Europe for several hundred years; surviving in some parts of Germany, according to Chancellor Kent, until near the middle of the last century. By the common law of England, as laid down even so lately as in the Commentaries of Blackstone, goods wrecked were adjudged to belong to the king, and the owner had no right of recovery until a curious statute of Edward II. gave him that right, upon the condition that some living creature should have escaped the wreck, to fictitiously represent him, it would seem, in the act of possession at the last moment.

This strange defect in the primitive idea of the right of property, lingering so obstinately and so long, illustrates the difficulty which men have always experienced in carrying that idea from a simpler to a more complicated set of circumstances, and the easiness with which their perception of the relations to which it attaches becomes confused by any separation, whether real or apparent, of the thing from the person. But, in the evolution of our civilized social state, more complex forms of property have been coming all the time into existence. In some of these, the person and the thing have been pushed apart to a wide remove from one another; in others, the association of ownership between them is subtilely conditioned by various circumstances and contingencies; in others, several persons are associated with the same thing, in common ownership, or with a succession of rights in it, or with rights that are various in degree; in still others, the thing which is the subject of property is a pure figment of the brain—the mere idea of a property-right which has itself become property by a convenient fiction. Again, half the wealth of the world has been acquiring of late a kind of duplicate shadow-form of existence, by paper representation, in a hundred modes—as in bonds, notes, drafts, stock certificates, bills of lading, etc.—and so plays a double part, one real and one fictitious, in the commercial transactions of the present day. That this protean mobility of form should be given to "property," and the subjects and conditions of ownership be so continually multiplied and modified, without obscuring the indirect relations which "property" creates between men, and confusing the perception of them, is quite impossible. Along with this obscuring cause there is another