668 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the capital and the other the labor, the boat is not " distributed " ; 

 but the ownership of it is, and presumably according to economic 

 principles. So there may often be distribution of property more 

 or less than commensurate with the distribution of wealth ; and it 

 is the distribution of property which, in fact, most concerns the 

 economist. 



A great deal has been written about this subject of private 

 property. The world is filling with people, and it is filling with 

 good things which these people like and want. Shall the people 

 as a body own the goods in a lump, or shall the ownership and 

 enjoyment of the goods be divided among the human beings in 

 proportion to the ability of each to get hold of them by hard 

 work, or skillful work, or monopoly, or trickery, or any good or 

 bad superiority which helps to constitute him one of the " fittest " 

 and most likely to survive in such a contest ? Shall even the 

 planet itself, crowding with the less fit, be parceled out among 

 these good and bad " fittest " ? Can there be a more momentous 

 question than this ? Can there be one which more deeply con- 

 cerns the economist as such ? On the very day on which I write, 

 four men are to hang for committing murder in answer to this 

 question. The mere presence in the community of a considerable 

 and clamorous element which denies the right of property has its 

 grave economic effects, and hence is a matter of great moment to 

 the economist. Hanging four men, or a hundred men, will not 

 silence that element. 



This, however, is not the only aspect of the question that con- 

 cerns us, though most writers seem to have thought so. The 

 orthodox have been content to prove, or perhaps only assert, that 

 the right of property is the greatest of all the stimuli to labor 

 and frugality, just as Proudhon, on the other hand, was content 

 to show that property is robbery. If any distinction has been 

 made as to the comparative validity of titles to different kinds of 

 property, it has usually been thought sufficient to distinguish 

 between owning the earth and owning its products. But it is not 

 so simple a matter as this. Our great danger is not the theo- 

 retical denial of the right of property in general. We are daily 

 called upon to defend it against attack in detail. Bastiat saw this 

 half a century ago, when he was in the thick of the hottest battle 

 that has ever raged about the citadel of property. And now that 

 the contest has broken out in that quarter again, and under the 

 inspiration of being interrupted in the midst of this very sen- 

 tence by a bulletin announcing that the condemned anarchists 

 have just been hanged, it would be easy to write a book from the 

 following text, which is to be found in the eighth chapter of the 

 " Harmonies of Economics " : 



" A mere theoretical war against property is by no means the 



