ORIGIN OF THE BIGHTS OF PROPERTY. 671 



considered perfectly normal in the communities where it pre- 

 vails. I have heard it preached from a Northern pulpit that denial 

 to the Southern black of the right of property in himself was a 

 divine institution. The assertion of that right, and of the idea 

 which Prof. Sturtevant calls a " simple intuition, originating in 

 the spontaneous action of every human mind/' drove many of the 

 stronger abolitionists into open rejection of the sacred writings of 

 Christianity, which nowhere furnished them a text for their side 

 of the argument. The poorest slave may own something, but he 

 does not own himself. 



Neither does every man, in any community, own all the prod- 

 ucts of his voluntary efforts. Wage-workers never do. They are 

 increasing in proportionate numbers. Hence the second part of 

 the assumed law of nature on which it is proposed to rest the 

 whole science of political economy is less and less true every year, 

 and the whole present progress of civilization is away from it. 

 The belief that it ought to be true is the foundation of the creed 

 of those anarchists who have just been hanged, and of those who 

 mourn them. " Labor produces all the wealth, and labor ought to 

 own it," is their familiar cry. Since few things are produced by 

 the efforts of single-handed men ; since, as I have shown in the 

 second paper of this series, nearly all production is by combina- 

 tion — ownership of product by producers, if it is to be universal 

 and complete, must also be in combination, or, as we say, in com- 

 mon. This is the straight read to communism, and the first guide- 

 board on the way is this doctrine that property in anything 

 springs certainly and exclusively from effort expended in its pro- 

 duction. Yet it is a doctrine which has often been laid down 

 by the most conservative economists and philosophers. Locke 

 stated it two hundred years ago in these terms : " Whatsoever, 

 then, he removes out of the state that Nature hath provided, and 

 left it in, he hath mixed his labor with it, and joined to it some- 

 thing that is his own, and thereby makes it his property." McCul- 

 loch says,* " All have been impressed with the reasonableness of 

 the maxim which teaches that the produce of a man's labor and 

 the work of his hands are exclusively his own." 



So Laveleye \ says that " property in all the fruits of his work 

 must be guaranteed to the worker." Bonamy Price J is equally 

 emphatic : " I made it and it is mine, is a sentiment which asserts 

 property in every human soul." Imagine the navvies who build 

 a railroad saying this ! And Herbert Spencer tt even informs us 

 that, " from the beginning, things identified as products of a man's 



* " Principles of Political Economy," chap, ii, section 1. 

 f " Elements of Political Economy," chap, iii, section 9. 

 \ " Practical Political Economy," chap. vi. 



* " Principles of Sociology," section 541. 



