II

PROGRESS BY PROPERTY

E leans upon his hoe. I suppose it is his.

There is a he, at least a possible he, behind the slant brow-a soul with own-ness and, therefore, a right to own. So much all ownership implies. It is the recognition of personality by social law or custom. It means that society has reached that stage where it sees in every man, even the lowest, the whole form, the whole title, the whole destiny, of society itself, which erewhile, as tribe or clan or family, was the sole owner, or person or man. Man now has become a man, and become such by ability to discern in each man an entire manhood with all the claims and prerogatives that pertain to its richest and most universal nature. He, the individual, is the final type of all social use and development. He embodies all past progress, and furnishes the norm of all progress to come. In his consciousness, Society becomes self-conscious, and thus attains a true selfhood. As he grows, it will grow; by his greatness it will become great; his wealth will be its wealth; his freedom its freedom, and his perfection the last blossom of that life whose roots have shot up from the muck of savagery through many world-weathers, and twists of struggle, to this flower of light.

τρ

And if Society be immortal in its age-long career, then the "hoe" man must be immortal, too, by virtue of the same supreme right of ownership or ownhood. Else how incommensurate any worth or right of the individual beside that of tribe or nation or the Race! Individuals die, the tribe lives on; tribes perish, the nations live on; nations waste and decay, Humanity endures, and waxes mightier with constant renewals of youth. In order that a man may be the ultimate social form, he must involve the whole social substance; be himself tribe, state, race, with all that their life can reach or hope. And this he can be only by having their utmost immortality, with its infinite progress of power. Consequently he stands for infinitude. Nothing less than infinitude can measure the right with which Society vests him to realize and be himself. And since it is self which he is to realize, this realization can only be by his freedom to think, to purpose, to do—a freedom which must be as large as his destiny, and with no bound except such as manhood itself prescribes. For it is a man's freedom to be man, not brute; to grow in manhood, not out of it; to socialize himself by thought and will through all the relations of Society, not to desocialize himself by purely private and egoistic conduct, if any such conduct were possible as human growth aloof from or against those forces and laws of the house, the market, the forum, the Church, by which the blood of mankind circulates in every man.

Nay, he gains freedom only by obeying those laws, and using the forces they control. He does not begin with freedom; he begins a slave. He is a

slave to nature, from which he can emancipate himself only by industry, the measure of his emancipation being the wealth he puts between himself and nature's wild-animal wants, which would make of him mere skin and gullet. He is a slave to his savage fellow-men, who seek his life, so that his daily task is to slay or be slain. He is a slave to his own clan, which allows him no personality or sense of it-no soul that he can call his own. is no his, because no he. He as yet is not.

There

He rises only as Society rises. Before he comes to ownership and can lean on his hoe, the savage occupation of ceaseless war has ceased; the nomad wandering which cultivated no land, but sought pasturage wherever it might be found, has ceased; the barbaric agriculture, with slaves and women to dig the common ground, while warriors still fought to keep or extend possession, which was the alone right of tribal property-this, too, has ceased. Wherever such conditions still exist, there is no private property except of actual wear or consumption, or in the name of the clan. Long, long and slow and hard has been man's upward struggle from brutehood and bondage before he attains that degree of social wealth or well-being which enables him to think freedom, and recognize his thought in the form of proper-ty, or his-ness, as a dominion over things which belong to every man by virtue of his manhood, so that all things henceforth shall be no longer mere things, but signs of some soul or self that owns, and thus ensouls or enselfs them.

Nor has man risen so far by accident. Theorists may play at sociologic explanation by seeking in

emergencies and accidents of climate or conflict, for reasons of development, as if it might have taken another course or none at all; but the fact that in all climates, and in spite of all accidents, man has in each degree of his development the same sort of ownership, proves that the sort of ownership characterizes his very nature as man, and determines the distance of his climb towards the summits of his destiny.

In private ownership the distance had attained a sense of the infinite worth of the individual soul. And the whole course of civilization since has marked, by expansions of that ownership, man's crescent consciousness of the soul's worth as individually, no less than socially, lord of the earth and heir to the whole heaven of human hope and destiny. To interpret his progress as a measure of greed grown omnivorous, a huge hyena-sniff for social meat, shows what idea of man rules the mind of the interpreter. Scarcely out of the æons of heredity and progress in hyenaship may we look for the angels and ministers of grace who will stop the ancestral glut of private property, in order that they may apportion to every man according to his need, and fan away his fever of discontent with white wings that have suddenly sprouted from hyena shoulder-blades.

Private property is man's tribute to his own soul. And his unwillingness to restrain its acquisition by any other laws than the soul's own equity among souls is his unwillingness to arrest an immortal impulse, and pen up an immortal career.

For though the relation of man to property were

but a relation to things, it would still be a relation of his whole nature, and carry his whole nature with it. He is man, all man, on whatever plane he stands, whether it be the plane of industry or commerce or art or philosophy or religion-standing there in the full stature of his manhood, and giving its immortal shape to the shadow it casts across the world. Nay, his relationships are not so sliced into planes that they can be truly viewed apart. His industry is charged with commerce, his commerce with art, his art with philosophy and religion. Though the foot press the ground, brain-blood flows through it, and feels in it the sense and purpose of the brain's divine mission. Nor can the foot be a foot disjoined from that cranial sentiency. So all treatments of man's activity as split into sections, each complete by itself,-one for economics, another for ethics, another for æsthetics, another for religion, -do but murder to dissect. They are the sciences of the dead limbs and bone-dust of Society, not of its health and strength and grace. Everywhere industry serves trade, trade serves a morality that heightens as it widens in its world scope, and all of them serve the art that expresses their ideal in beautiful forms before they become aware of it in their less conscious realizations, while religion steadfastly holds them to their last and highest, as their only complete, truth and right. Faith in the Godman, and in the God-manhood of every man, runs through the entire framework and tissue of modern Society; and to assail any of its great organic processes is to strike at the very heart of its creed. It is not strange, therefore, that modern socialism