personal property transmissible, like the shares 

 of a joint stock company. Here is what an 

 individualist like Herbert Spencer writes as a 

 conclusive argument: "At first sight it seems 

 fairly inferable that the absolute ownership of 

 land by private persons must be the ultimate 

 state which industrialism brings about. But 

 though industrialism has thus far tended to 

 individualise possession of land, while indivi- 

 dualising all other possession, it maybe doubted 

 tvhether the final stage is at present reached. 

 Ownership established by force does not stand 

 on the same footing as ownership established 

 by contract ; and though multiplied sales and 

 purchases, treating the two ownerships in the 

 same way, have tacitly assimilated them, the 

 assimilation may eventually be denied. The 

 analogy furnished by assumed rights of 

 possession over human beings helps us 

 to recognise this possibility. For while 

 prisoners of war, taken by force and held as 

 property in a vague way (being at first 

 much on a footing with other members of 

 a household), were reduced more definitely 

 to the form of property when the buying 

 and selling of slaves became general ; and 

 while it might, centuries ago, have been 

 thence inferred that the ownership of man by 

 man was an ownership in course of being 

 permanently established ;* yet we see that a 

 later stage of civilisation, reversing this 

 process, has destroyed ownership of man by 



* It is known that Aristotle, taking for an absolute 

 sociological law a law relative to his time, affirmed that 

 slavery was a natural institution, and that men were 

 distinguished by nature as free men and slaves. 



