506 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



squatted upon, it will be simply because the results of labor have 

 become connected with it, or the value of other land or other 

 property the products of labor, for the use of which labor com- 

 petes, are reflected upon it. In 1620 the land upon which the 

 city of Boston stands could have been bought for a string of sea 

 shells; in 1894 its value for assessment as property for taxation 

 was probably in excess of $900,000,000. But in both instances the 

 valuation was determined by one and the same standard: in the first, 

 by the amount of labor required to collect and string the shells; 

 and in the second, by the amount of labor and capital which is the 

 result of labor which has been embodied in the land or become 

 connected with it. Take away the labor and its accumulated results, 

 and the site of Boston will be worth no more at the present time than 

 it was in 1628, when William Blackstone first obtained it. 



Analyze next the alleged property in bank notes. The coin in 

 the vaults of the bank, the vaults, the building, the books, the furni- 

 ture, and other physical actualities the results of labor employed 

 in transacting the business of banking, are the real property of the 

 bank. The bank stock, so long as the bank exists, is merely a right 

 to receive dividends. The creation of a bank obviously does not cre- 

 ate any property. The notes discounted by the bank over its counter 

 are inchoate titles to the debtor's property or to his rights to prop- 

 erty; and the notes issued by the bank are inchoate titles to the 

 bank's property or to its equitable rights to property. The bank, 

 apart from its physical actualities and machinery, is simply a ledger 

 recording credits and debits. But credits and debits are only con- 

 venient forms of bookkeeping, or the records of transfers of prop- 

 erty and of rights, titles, and interests in property pre-existing. 

 Credits and debits, moreover, stand to each other in the relation of an 

 equation. There can be no credit without a debit, and no debit 

 without a credit; strike out one side of the equation, and the other 

 disappears of necessity. If there were no creditors there could be 

 no debtors, and, vice versa, the moment debtors cease to be debtors, 

 that same moment creditors cease to be creditors.* 



Copyrights and patents are simply legislative enactments to pro- 

 tect pre-existing property. A manuscript, a painting, or an inven- 

 tion is the joint product of physical and intellectual labor, which the 

 copyright or patent right protects, the same as other forms of law 

 protect other visible and tangible property from robbery and spolia- 

 tion. The relation which these instrumentalities sustain to property 

 is clearly indicated by asking the question, whether there can be such 

 a thing as a patent granted for what has never been reduced to 



* The Supreme Court of Alabama has recently decided that when a bank in that State 

 owns real estate the same is not liable to taxation as a part of its capital stock. 



