CIVILIZATION AND MORALS. 561 



miliar closeness in the direct relations of person with person. This 

 fact is particularly apparent in the relationships which involve prop- 

 erty. 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 Koman jurisprudence this inequity was 

 corrected, but it reappeared in the legislation of the barbarian con- 

 querors 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 Com- 

 mentaries 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 I'ight, 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 mo- 

 ment. 



This strange defect in the primitive idea of the right of property, 

 lingering so obstinately and so long, illustrates the difficulty Avhich 

 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 com- 

 plex 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 con- 

 venient fiction. Again, half the wealth of the world has been acquir- 

 ing 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 "prop- 

 erty " creates between men, and confusing the perception of them, is 

 quite impossible. Along with this obscuring cause there is another 

 VOL. XI. 36 



