thod, to every house in the nation. Observe the pauper fawning with abject vileness upon his rich benefactor, and speechless with sensations of gratitude for having received that which he ought to have claimed with an erect mien, and with a consciousness that his claim was irresistible. Observe the servants that follow in a rich man's train, watchful of his looks, anticipating his commands, not daring to reply to his insolence, all their time and their efforts under the direction of his caprice. Observe the tradesman, how he studies the passions of his customers, not to correct but to pamper them; the vileness of his flattery, and the systematic constancy with which he exaggerates the merit of his commodities.

Ambition is of all the passions of the human mind the most extensive in its ravages. It adds district to district, and kingdom to kingdom. It spreads bloodshed, and calamity, and conquest over the face of the earth. But the passion itself, as well as the means of gratifying it, is the produce of the prevailing system of property. It is only by means of accumulation that one man obtains an unresisted sway over multitudes of others. It is only by means of a certain distribution of income, that the present governments of the world are retained in existence. Nothing more easy than to plunge nations so organised into war. It is clear, that war in every horrid form is the growth of property. It is property that forms men into one common mass, and makes them fit to be played upon like a mute machine. -Godwin.

In the most refined states of Europe, the inequality of property has risen to an alarming height. Vast numbers of their inhabitants are deprived of almost every accommodation that can render life tolerable or secure. Their utmost industry scarcely suffices for their support. The women and children lean with an insupportable weight upon the efforts of the man, so that a large family has, in the lower order of life, become a proverbial expression for an uncommon degree of poverty and wretchedness. If sickness, or some of those casualties which are perpetually incident to an active and laborious life, he superadded to these burdens, the distress is still greater.-Godwin.

It is contrary to the divine laws of nature that some mortals should superabound and luxuriate in what is necessary and useful, and also in what is useless and injurious;

It

while from the great mass of their fellow beings the means are thereby withheld by which their invaluable capacities, physical, mental, and moral, ought to be well cultivated for their own advantage, and for the benefit of the world. is contrary to the well-being, and best and highest interest of society, and of every individual of which it is composed, that the enormous, almost incalculable productive power which modern science has placed at the disposal of man, and all his superior as well as his inferior faculties, should be employed day by day, and year after year, with energy and talent, in fruitless attempts to create a sufficiency of wealth and privilege for the individual, in opposition and competition with all other individuals. It is the direct application of the mighty energies, powers, and capacities, physical and mental, to produce that which, when attained to the greatest possible extent, for the individual, is useless, burdensome, and often highly injurious to the imagined successful possessor.

The arrangements which are requisite to enable individuals to obtain and secure for their own use only private property, necessarily render it impracticable that any individual should attain, under those arrangements, the free and beneficial use of as much property as all may enjoy under another system, in which no permanent private property shall be necessary, or even desired by any one.

The certain consequence of a system founded on private property is to produce an hostile and unnatural state of society, by which very great additional labour will be required to create comparatively a very small amount of available wealth for the population individually or in the aggregate. In consequence of each individual being opposed in his attempts to acquire wealth by all the other members of the community, in the endeavours to accumulate it also, an addition is unavoidably made to the whole labour of society, of which no one trained in, and remaining under, the influence of the individual system, can form any adequate conception. The individual competition and contest for private wealth may be aptly compared to forces of nearly equal powers acting continually in opposition to each other; and, in consequence, the efforts of one counteracted by the efforts of others in every direction in which it may attempt to proceed, the energies of all become nearly equipoised, and the power of the whole

is rendered of little or no effect. By these proceedings, under this wretchedly insane system, not one portion of real, intrinsic, valuable wealth is brought into existence for the benefit of mankind, for a hundred, or more correctly for a thousand, that, under a rational system for the creation of wealth, would be obtained for the use of the world; and obtained with half of the physical exertions, and without any of the mental anxieties, which the existing vile practices of society require.

The arrangements which are required to establish and support a system of private property, render it absolutely necessary to create measures to prevent the production of a sufficiency of the necessaries and comforts of life for a very large portion of the community, and to implant in childhood, and to cultivate through life, the most inferior and injurious feelings and passions, rendering society a chaos of the most incongruous proceedings injurious to young and old, rich and poor, the governors and the governed.

A priesthood, with all its mental oppression, unavoidable hypocrisy, and pecuniary exactions, is necessary to aid in obtaining and securing private property; and to effect these objects, they must teach doctrines which implant all the inferior and injurious feelings and passions, which can be forced into the human mind. The complicated, perplexed, inconsistent, unjust, and wretchedly-injurious system of laws, is also required to support the system of private property, although by its support thousands are deprived of all the private property which they have acquired through many years of toil and anxiety. All the direct expense of law-suits and of the machinery of law; all the time of those engaged in this profession; all the time of the suitors in the various courts; all the anxieties which they experience to withdraw attention from other and more beneficial pursuits; all the heart-burnings, agitations, and quarrels, which law contests create, to occupy the time and attention of the parties; are all direct deductions from the amount of real and valuable wealth, that, without anxiety and unpleasant feelings of any kind, would be otherwise created.

The complicated arrangements necessary to procure and obtain all the rights, as they are termed, of private property, are measures necessarily and unavoidably productive

of motives to the commission of an incalculable extent of crimes, and of forming society into a machine too complex to be understood by almost any mind, in consequence of the innumerable laws, customs, and regulations, which become requisite to meet the growing evils which daily arise, while property is accumulating in the hands of a few, and diminishing in proportion in the possession of the many; or while the extension of inequality of rank and condition is upon the increase.-Owen.

CHAPTER II.

PRIVATE PROPERTY IN LAND.

THERE is nothing which so generally strikes the imagination, and engages the affections of mankind, as the right of property; or that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe. And yet there are very few, that will give themselves the trouble to consider the original and foundation of this right. Pleased as we are with the possession, we seem afraid to look back to the means by which it was acquired, as if fearful of some defect in our title; or at best we rest satisfied with the decision of the laws in our favour, without examining the reason or authority upon which those laws have been built. We think it enough that our title is derived by the grant of the former proprietor, by descent from our ancestors, or by the last will and testament of the dying owner; not caring to reflect that (accurately and strictly speaking) there is no foundation in nature or in natural law, why a set of words upon parchment should convey the dominion of land; why the son should have a right to exclude his fellow-creatures from a determinate spot of ground, because his father had done so before him; or why the occupier of a particular field or jewel, when lying on his death-bed and no longer able to maintain possession, should be entitled to tell the rest of the world which of them should enjoy it after him. These inquiries, it must be owned, would be useless and even troublesome

in common life. It is well if the mass of mankind will obey the laws when made, without scrutinizing too nicely into the reasons of making them. But, when law is considered not only as matter of practice, but also as a rational science, it cannot be improper or useless to examine more deeply the rudiments and grounds of these positive constitutions of society.

In the beginning of the world, we are informed by holy writ, the all-bountiful Creator gave to man "dominion over all the earth; and over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." This is the only true and solid foundation of man's dominion over external things, whatever airy metaphysical notions may have been started by fanciful writers upon this subject. The earth, therefore, and all things therein, are the general property of all mankind, exclusive of other beings, from the immediate gift of the Creator. And, while the earth continued bare of inhabitants, it is reasonable to suppose, that all was in common among them, and that every one took from the public stock to his own use such things as his immediate necessities required.

Not that this communion of goods seems ever to have been applicable, even in the earliest ages, to aught but the substance of the thing; nor could it be extended to the use of it. For, by the law of nature and reason, he, who first began to use it, acquired therein a kind of transient property, that lasted so long as he was using it, and no longer or, to speak with greater precision, the right of possession continued for the same time only that the act of possession lasted. Thus the ground was in common, and no part of it was the permanent property of any man in particular; yet whoever was in the occupation of any determined spot of it, for rest, for shade, or the like, acquired for the time a sort of ownership, from which it would have been unjust, and contrary to the law of nature, to have driven him by force; but the instant that he quitted the use or occupation of it, another might seize it without injustice. Thus also a vine or other tree might be said to be in common, as all men were equally entitled to its produce; and yet any private individual might gain the sole property of the fruit, which he had gathered for his own repast. A doctrine well illustrated by Cicero, who compares the world