Where it really prevails, all the advantages of the piece-work system are obtained in a worthy and organic manner, and without its atomistic drawbacks.14

14 In the German colonies of Mennonites in Russia, every youth serves a few years in the family of some other peasant. This is considered a sort of school. Wages are of course very large, and the treatment very mild. v. Haxthausen, Studien, II, 185. Southwestern Germany where small landed proprietors are many, something very analogous to this continues. (v. d. Goltz, loc. cit., 452.)

CHAPTER V.

COMMUNITY OF GOODS AND PRIVATE PROPERTY.

CAPITAL-PROPERTY.

SECTION LXXVII.

CAPITAL.-IMPORTANCE OF PRIVATE PROPERTY.

As human labor can attain its full development, only on the supposition that personal freedom is allowed to develop to its full economic importance and dimensions, so capital can develop its full productive power only on the supposition of the existence of the freedom of personal property. Who would save anything, that is, give up present enjoyment, if he were not certain of future enjoyment? The legitimacy of private property has, since the time of Locke, been based, by the greater number of political economists, on the right inherent in every workman, either to consume or to save the product of his labor. But it should not be forgotten here that,.at least in the higher stages of the economy of a nation, scarcely any work or saving is possible without the coöperation of society. And society must be conceived not only as the sum-total of the now living individuals that compose it, but in its entire

1 For a masterly exposition of the doctrine that the right of prescription or limitation is related to the politico-economical necessity of property, see John Stuart Mill, Principles, 3, II, ch. 2, sec. 2.

2

Locke, On Civil Government, II, § 25-51; and so L. Mendelssohn, Jerusa lem (1783), 32; Thiers, Du Droit de la Propriété (1849).

past, present and future, and also as being led and borne onward by eternal ideas and wants.3

3 Modern writers, in their attempt to find a philosophical basis for the right of property, have taken two principal directions, the first a juridical, the second a political one. The axiom, res nullius cedit primo occupanti (compare L. 3, Digest, XLI, 1), explains only the smallest part of the relations of property, and that only because of a very fortuitous circumstance. According to Hobbes (Leviathan, 24), property has its origin in the recognition of it by the power of the state, by the autorité publique, the gouvernement (Bossuet, Politique tirée de l'Ecriture, Sainte, L. 3, 4), or as Montesquieu (Esprit des Lois XXVI., 15) more mildly expresses it, in the laws. The application of this principle would, on account of the extreme changeableness of the laws of every state, lead to most extreme insecurity, and to a steady oscillation from one Utopia to another, from one revolution to another, if it were not, at the same time, recognized that each one had a just title to the acquisitions he had made, not because the law, for the time being existing, acknowledged the right, but because they were the product of his labor and saving. The theory which bases the right of property on contract cannot be objected to with as much reason. Thus, Hugo Grotius, Jus Belli et Pacis, II, 2, who even justifies the occupation of things without an owner, on the supposition of the existence of an implied contract. It is very characteristic of the English, that in their political language, the words "liberty" and "property " are so frequently found in each other's company. In one of his classic speeches made by Fox in 1784, he gives a definition of liberty which begins with the words, "It consists in the safe and sacred possession of a man's property" etc. The recent doctrine, not unfrequently to be met with, that every man has a right to an amount of property corresponding to his wants, may be used to sanction all kinds of socialistic inferences. An entirely bewildered and bewildering description is to be found in Proudhon's Qu'est ce que la Propriété, 1848, as the precursor of which Brissot's Recherches philosophiques sur le Droit de Propriété et le Vol, may be considered. In medieval times, there are always a multitude of other titles to property besides production and saving. The title which is held in highest esteem for the time being is always because of this very extreme vis-a-vis of all other titles, strengthened and made general.

SECTION LXXVIII.

SOCIALISM AND COMMUNISM.

In opposition to this, the idea of a community of goods has found favor, especially in times when the four following conditions met:1

A. A well-defined confrontation of rich and poor. So long as there is a middle class of considerable numbers between them, the two extremes are kept, by its moral force, from coming into collision. There is no greater preservative against envy of the superior classes and contempt for the inferior, than the gradual and unbroken fading of one class of society into another. Sperate miseri, cavete felices! In such a state of social organization, we find the utmost and freshest productive activity at every round of the great ladder. Those at the bottom are straining every nerve to rise, and those higher up,

1 The word socialism brought into use by L. Reybaud is as ambiguous as the word communism is simple and intelligible. But most socialists agree that actual "society" (which is indeed to be distinguished from the state) is, together with its foundations, the existing relations of property and the family, entirely wrong. A radical reconstruction, they say, is needed to remove forever the chief evil of this system, viz.: the glaring difference between the rich and the poor, the educated and the uneducated. The difference between the doctrines of the socialists and of Political Economy does not, by any means, consist in this, that the former concerns itself more with the welfare of the lower classes, or even that it gives wider scope to economy in common. But socialism is, indeed, a living or housekeeping in common (Gemeinwirthschaft), which goes far beyond the feeling for the common interest (Gemeinsinn). Such economy in common is always opposed to freedom, and, at its first introduction, contrary to law. It can guaranty no compensation to those who have suffered from violence or force, because it leads to a thoughtless and wasteful exhaustion of the nation's resources, inasmuch as it weakens the incentive to industry and frugality. Political Economy, on the other hand, recommends an expropriation when the incentives to industry and frugality are thereby strengthened; and the increased resources thus obtained serve it, as full compensation to those whose property has been expropriated.

not to fall below. But where the rich and the poor are separated by an abyss which there is no hope of ever crossing, how pride on the one side and envy on the other rage! and especially in the foci of industry, the great cities, where the deepest misery is found side by side with the most_brazenfaced luxury, and where the wretched themselves conscious of their numbers, mutually excite their own bad passions. It cannot, unfortunately, be denied, that when a nation has attained the acme of its development, we find a multitude of tendencies prevailing to make the rich richer and the poor, at least relatively poorer, and thus to diminish the numbers of the middle class from both sides; unless, indeed, remedial influences are brought to bear and to operate in a contrary direction.2

B. A high degree of the division of labor, by which, on the one hand, the mutual dependence of man on man grows ever greater, but by which, at the same time, the eye of the uncultured man becomes less and less able to perceive the connection existing between merit and reward, or service and remuneration. Let us betake ourselves in imagination to Crusoe's island. There, when one man, after the labor of many months, has hollowed out a tree into a canoe, with no tools but an animal's tooth, it does not occur to another who, in the meantime was, it may be, sleeping on his bear-skin, to contest the right of the former to the fruit of his labor. How different this from the condition of things where civilization is advanced, as it is in our day; where the banker, by a single stroke of his pen, seems to earn a thousand times more than a day-laborer in a week; where, in the case of those who loan money on interest, their debtors too frequently forget how laborious was the process of acquiring the loaned capital by the possessors, or their predecessors in ownership. More especially, we have, in times of "over-population," whole masses

2 See Roscher, Betrachtungen über Socialismus und Communismus, Ber liner Zeitschrift für Geschicht wissenschaft, 1845, III, 422 ff.