98 THE COMING OF SOCIALISM 



He is calling the State to ratify not his will, but its 

 own. 



Hence we can condemn the mere Individualist from 

 his own mouth. In his claim for the acknowledgment and 

 defence of his property as a right, he is admitting that 

 his property is an institution of the State. His demand 

 that the State shall throw its aegis over his property means 

 that the State, in protecting him, is only making good its 

 own decrees. 



Hence, further, the proj:)grty_of an individual is a 

 symbol of remmciatipj^on the part of society. Property 

 is an ethical fact, implying, on the part of society, the 

 recognition of a restraining and binding though self- 

 imposed law. Indeed, the essence of private property is 

 that it is the result of an act whereby society endows its 

 individual members with rights against itself. Merely 

 private self-assertion can never of itself create property ; 

 that can be done only by the affirmation of the social will. 

 The individual's rights are therefore not individual in the 

 isolating sense, but social. They are rights because they 

 are not merely private. The more private they are the 

 more they tend to vanish as rights, and the more the 

 property becomes a mere possession held by force. On 

 the other hand, the more full and sacred the rights the 

 more they embody the mind of society, and are endowed 

 and endorsed by the social will. 



We arrive thus at a conclusion which is as important 

 as it is interesting. We took up the conception of private 

 property for analysis because it seemed prima fade to con- 

 tradict our main thesis, namely, that spirit, in breaking 

 down all final antagonism to itself and abolishing every 

 exclusive "other," nevertheless did not absorb that other 



