5 o 4 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



this conclusion, namely, that property, at least for the purpose of 

 taxation, is always a 'physical actuality, with inhering rights or 

 titles, the product solely of labor, and is always measured in respect 

 to value and for exchange by labor. 



Thus, for example, a fish free in the ocean is not property; but 

 when it has been caught through the instrumentality of labor it be- 

 comes property. Property, furthermore, can not be created except 

 by an application of labor of some kind to material substances, which 

 because they are substances and in order to be substances must have 

 both a corpus, or an entity, and a situs, or a situation. Human 

 labor incorporated in things, and thus saved to those who acquire 

 the things, is also what constitutes value or capital; and nothing can 

 be capital but the existing results of previous labor, which can con- 

 tribute to man's enjoyment and well-being. 



It is interesting also to note in this connection how the ety- 

 mology of the Latin words possessus and possideo, namely, po and 

 sideo, to sit by or on, and from which in turn we have the English 

 word possession — the common definition of property being some- 

 thing possessed — curiously harmonize with and confirm the conclu- 

 sion that property must be always a physical actuality. For it is 

 clear that it is only a material something, a visible and tangible 

 entity, that one can sit down on, and not an invisible, intangible noth- 

 ing, the fiction of law or of the imagination. 



A limitation, little recognized by legal writers and authorities, 

 on the exercise of the right of eminent domain (the name given to 

 the power inherent in state sovereignty of making a compulsory 

 purchase of private property for public use), also sustains the cor- 

 rectness of the definition of property as above given; inasmuch as 

 this right is never conceded or made applicable to other than an 

 actuality, and never to a mere representative of something that is not 

 material. Thus one of the illustrations of Roman jurisprudence 

 handed down by Tacitus was to the effect that an emperor was 

 not allowed to appropriate the right to carry a stream of water 

 through the lands of a private individual, but did pay damages for 

 the injuries thereby accruing to the lands. 



All investigation on this subject can therefore, it is believed, lead 

 to but one conclusion, and that is that property is always " embodied 

 or accumulated labor." And as political economy does not, and 

 jurisprudence ought not to take cognizance of chateaux en Espagne, 

 these are the only senses in which political economy and the law can 

 legitimately reason about property.* 



* The statement is frequently made that all value is the product of labor. Adam Smith 

 aays, " Labor is the fund which originally supplies a nation with its wealth." McCulloch 

 says, " Labor is the only source of wealth " ; and all the early writers, in one form or 



