ORIGIN OF THE BIGHTS OF PROPERTY. 673 



influenced by the labor agitators, who base their arguments on 

 the unguarded utterances of the great thinkers quoted above. 



It is all as plain as day. What the wage-worker acquires by 

 his work is not a proprietary interest in the thing he has worked 

 on, but a right of action against the person who employed him to 

 work on it. It is not a jus in re, but a jus in personam. It is a 

 claim against his employer. It is not a claim for any particular 

 chattel or product, but for legal-tender money of a certain total 

 amount. This amount is determined, not, or at any rate not di- 

 rectly, by the value of the thing produced, nor yet by the value 

 that his work added to it, but by the demand and supply of his 

 kind of labor. The legal claim itself is a subject of property. It 

 can be bought and sold. The community stands ready to enforce 

 it, and thus gives it all its value. Property in this claim, or right 

 of action at law, is just as truly property as is property in the 

 material product, and it is often more reliable ; for it lives on, 

 even though the capitalist's property in his factory and its unsold 

 products is wholly destroyed by fire, or its value partially de- 

 stroyed by a tumble in the market. 



The theory we started out to combat consists, in fact, of four 

 propositions, and we have refuted three of them. We have proved 

 that it is not true that every man owns himself ; that it is not true 

 that every man owns his products, or the things with which he 

 has mixed his labor, nor that he gets thereby any proprietary 

 interest in them ; and that not the affirmative but the negative of 

 these propositions has been most generally accepted by mankind 

 as the true and natural state of the case. So much for what is. 

 It remains to inquire what ought to be ? What would be absolute 

 justice in the matter ? Would it be universal private ownership 

 of self and of the products of the labor of one's self ? To any such 

 question as this there are three possible answers. There is the 

 answer " Yes," there is the answer " No," and there is the answer 

 that it makes no practical difference what is absolutely just, since 

 absolute justice is unattainable or undesirable. If justice, like per- 

 petual motion, is beyond our reach, the most economical thing to 

 do is to find that out and cease to hope and struggle for it. Mean- 

 time economy of motion or of force is an approach toward per- 

 petual motion, and so we may find something, or conclude we 

 want nothing, that will be an approach toward absolute justice. 



Now, justice, like property, is an undefined, and quite likely 

 undefinable, term. Our ideas of it change from age to age. It is 

 related to the term and the thing " equality," and this we can all 

 understand. When it is said that two things equal each other, we 

 know exactly what is meant. The proposition that all men ought 

 to be equally rich and happy is perfectly clear. That would be 

 absolute equality. The idea of justice bears about the same rela- 



VOL. XXXT. 43 



