Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/201

 Rh difficulties of the principle of confiscation deserve more careful attention. It is generally proposed to be first applied to property in land, and to this extent it has secured many adherents. Yet the most ardent believer in the morality of such a step will confess the enormous difficulty in obtaining a national sanction even for it. It may he conceded that a country could be settled upon the principle of reserving to the community the beneficial ownership in all its lands, subject only to such privileges of occupancy as may be necessary to secure an adequate cultivation of them; or on the principle of unlimited absolute ownership in individual settlers; but when a country has been settled on the latter principle, when generations and centuries have passed, and society has become more and more closely compacted on such abasis, when ownership, however unwisely conceded, has passed through many hands, and the consideration of the transfer has in each case been the delivery of commodities fairly won by the labour and accumulated by the prudence of the transferee, or of persons from whom he has innocently derived them, it will be very difficult indeed to affirm the right of the community to resume without full recompense such ownership, except upon principles which would justify the confiscation by the community of all possessions. The only possible reply is that persons who have bought rights of absolute dominion in land have bought something which they ought to have known should never have been owned; but this retort will scarcely diminish the difficulty Socialism has to overcome in proposing the confiscation of land ownerships. The difficulty is confessedly greater of obtaining a popular approval of the morality of coufiscsting all ownerships, for to this it would seem thereare as yet but few converts. Yet this acquisition by the community must somehow be made, at least as far as regards what I may call vitalized capital—that is, capital which is employed in the prosecution of industry, if a régime of Socialism is to be established. Here we are not dealing with property in land, which might have been disallowed from the beginning without otherwise deranging the economic social organism, but with property in things the disallowance of which is the destruction of self-ownerships and the establishment of communism ab initio. The rudest device of the rudest savage must he treated as something contrived not for himself but for his kind. A man picks out and improves a stone or a stick to kill game, he weaves a coarse net of fibre to catch fish, he tames a beast to yield its labour to his command: his craft, his strength, his patience have secured them all; but, though the strength,