IN "Justice" as in "Social Statics," the chapter on the right to land is followed by a chapter on the right of property. That in "Social Statics" I have reprinted in full, to meet Mr. Spencer's subsequent assertion that it modified the radical conclusions of the preceding chapter. But it is hardly necessary thus to treat the similar chapter of "Justice." It begins (Section 54):

Since all material objects capable of being owned are in one way or other obtained from the earth, it results that the right of property is originally dependent on the right to the use of the earth. While there were yet no artificial products, and natural products were therefore the only things which could be appropriated, this was an obviously necessary connection. And though, in our developed form of society, there are multitudinous possessions, ranging from houses, furniture, clothes, works of art, to bank-notes, railway-shares, mortgages, government bonds, etc., the origins of which have no manifest relation to use of the earth; yet it needs but to remember that they either are, or represent, products of labor, that labor is made possible by food, and that food is obtained from the soil, to see that the connection, though remote and entangled, still continues. Whence it follows that a complete ethical justification for the right of property is involved in the same difficulties as the ethical justification for the right to the use of the

earth.

Since all material things capable of being owned consist either of land or products of land, the round

about connection between such things as are here specified and the earth, through the food consumed by laborers, is a queer one, which indicates what in some parts of "Social Statics" may be suspected, that in speaking of land Mr. Spencer, as is often the case with English writers, is really thinking only of agricultural land.

The difficulties of which he speaks are the difficulties he raises in "Social Statics," by confounding equal rights with joint rights, and he here again takes issue with Locke and assumes, as before, that for production to give title, the right of the producer to the use of material must be shown to be " "greater than the pre-existing rights of all other men put together." The forty-one years that have elapsed have left Mr. Spencer still entangled by this self-raised difficulty. But he now goes on to say that the difficulty arising from the question whether by labor “a man has made his right to the thing greater than the pre-existing rights of all other men put together 1. may be avoided however. There are three ways in which, under savage, semi-civilized, and civilized conditions, men's several rights of property may be established with due regard to the equal rights of all other men."

1 Mr. Spencer speaks of such usages as that an unsuccessful hunter in passing might take a deer from a trap for food, leaving head, skin, and saddle for the owner, as implying the belief of the tribesmen that "this prey was in part theirs before it was killed." But it no more implies this than the custom by which, among the early California rancheros, any traveller might catch a fresh horse, transfer his saddle and leave the tired one implied common property in horses, or than the kindly customs of essentially the same kind that are to be found wherever the struggle for existence that has developed with our civilization has not become intense.

In the savage condition, he says there is a tacit agreement that having equal opportunities of utilizing such products, appropriation achieved by one shall be passively assented to by the others.

As to the semi-civilized condition, he says:

We meet with usages having the same general implications. . . . It is perceived that the assent of the clan to ownership of food grown on an appropriated portion by any one, is implied in the assumptions of kindred ownership similarly established by all others. . . . In this case then as in the first, the right of property arises in conformity with the law of equal freedom.

So far then Mr. Spencer derives, and properly derives, the right of property from the exertion of labor under conditions in which all are equally free to make use of land. He now comes to his third division, where he is to show how in civilized conditions the right of property "may be established with due regard to the equal rights of all other men." I will quote this in full:

Though we cannot say that ownership of property, thus arising, results from actual contract between each member of the community and the community as a whole, yet there is something like a potential contract; and such potential contract might grow into an actual contract if one part of the community devoted itself to other occupations, while the rest continued to farm: a share of the produce being in such case payable by agreement to those who had ceased to be farmers, for the use of their shares of the land.1 We have no evidence that such a relation between occupiers and the community, with consequent

1 Here is another instance of the habit of thinking of land as only agricultural land. The assumption here is that farmers are the only users of land, whereas the obvious truth is that there is no occupation that can be carried on without the use of land, and that many other occupations require the use of much more valuable

authorized rights of property in the produce which remained after payment of a portion equivalent to rent, has ever arisen; for, as we have seen, the original ownership by the community has habitually been usurped by internal or external aggressors, and the rent, taking the shape, if not of produce, then of labor or military service, has been habitually paid to the usurper, a state of things under which equitable rights of property, in common with equitable rights of all kinds, are submerged. But out of such usurpations there has grown up, as we have seen, ownership by the state and tenancy under it; from which there may again arise a theoretically equitable right of property. In China, where "the land is all held. directly from the Crown" " on payment of an annual tax," "with composition for personal service to the government," the legitimate proprietorship of such produce as remains after payment of rent to the community, can be asserted only on the assumption that the emperor stands for the community. In India, where the government is supreme land-owner, and where, until the zemindar system was established, it was the direct receiver of rents, the derivation of a right of property by contract between the individual and the community can be still less asserted without a strained interpretation. Nor at home, where the theory that each land-owner is a tenant of the crown is little more than a theory, is there any better fulfilment of the ethical requirement. Only here and there, where state-ownership is not potential but actual, and ordinary rents are paid by occupiers to the Crown (which has now in such cases come to be identified with the community), has there been consequently established that kind of use of the earth which gives a theoretically valid basis to the right of private property.

Now what is it that Mr. Spencer here says? It is that a theoretically equitable right of property does not now exist in civilized conditions; but that it may arise if the now nominal and potential supreme own

land than does farming. In the occupancy of his London apartments Mr. Spencer himself is more of a land user, value considered, than many a small farmer.

ership of land by the state is made real and actual by the taking for the use of the community, by the representatives of the community, of the rents that are (or should be) paid by occupiers of land.

Truly "Justice" is a suprising book. Here we have Mr. Spencer going back to the very principle he has just recanted.

In one sentence of this paragraph he says that we have no evidence that this equitable adjustment of the rights to land in conformity with the needs of the civilized state has ever arisen, since the original ownership of land by the community has been habitually usurped, and in another sentence he says vaguely that it has arisen only here and there. But that it may arise and ought to arise, and would give an even theoretically perfect basis to the right of property, this section states, if not as clearly, but yet on careful reading as unmistakably as does "Social Statics" itself.

The paragraph just quoted is followed by this recapitulatory paragraph, with which the section closes:

But admitting that the establishment of an ethically complete right of property is beset with difficulties like those which beset the establishment of an ethically complete right to the use of the earth, we are nevertheless shown by a survey of the facts which existing primitive societies present, and the facts traceable in the early histories of civilized societies, that the right of property is originally deducible from the law of equal freedom; and that it ceases to be so deducible only when the other corollaries from the law of equal freedom have been disregarded.

Or to put this statement of the propositions of this section in fuller form, they are: (1) That the estab