“La. Propriete, c'est le vol"
By HONOR CROOME ROUDHON'S intellectual descendants do not go quite so far nowadays as Proudhon did. The simple creed that property is theft would be too awkward. for supporters of an administration frantically imploring the public to save. Moreover, since even the most intransigent Socialists have learned from experience that public ownership, whatever its moral beauties, is at present compatible with efficient stewardship only over a very limited field, the institution of private property has to be recognised, outside that field, as a necessary pis aller.
Envy can call on allies by no means base. It would be a gross libel on the British labour movement to deny the disinterested goodwill, the genuine altruism and Christian neighbourliness and the noble indignation's which have inspired many of its leaders and supporters. But though indignation may be directed against abuse or callousness, and altruism may spontaneously renounce privilege, and disinterested goodwill may, through rational argument, conclude that the sphere of private property should be narrowed or its distribution altered, these supply no motive for hostility to private property as such. Envy has, however, another and more sinister ally—an ally, in our own day, more important ; the ambition of those wielding the power of the State to extend it. It is more sinister because envy, nasty as it is, is essentially a vice of the nursery, of the grossly immature ego ; here, if anywhere, is scope for education, and, on the whole, it is rare for the grossly immature to Wield more than a sporadic, election:time influence on the course of events. Ambition, on the other hand, is the last infirmity of noble mind, and ambition for power, even if only for power to push through an admirable administrative plan without meeting irritating obstacles,' is the occupational disease of politicians.
Now property protects its holder against power. Without property he is the slave of his immediate necessities ; he must work at whatever comes handiest or collapse into Public Assist- ance. To the liberal-minded this state of the propertiless is wholly deplorable, regardless of whether the pressures to which he is subjected are wielded by his richer fellows or by the State. To the authoritarian it is not deplorable at all ; on the contrary. " The use of common land by labourers operates upon the mind as a sort of independence," mourned one Mr. Brishton nearly two hundred years ago. Let the commons be enclosed, he said, and " that subordination of the lower ranks of society, which in the present times is so much wanted, would be considerably secured." The " independence " of the pre-enclosure labourers arose, not because their property was common, but because it was property ; their subsequent " subordination " arose, not because others possessed property, but because they lacked it. Today the ranks of the Socialist intelligentsia swarm with Mr. Brishtons regretting the insubordination of property-holders. For a man having enough property to live on can choose his job Nevertheless, the Socialist attitude remains fundamentally unchanged. Ownership is tainted, owners are suspect, and the right to hold property is of all human rights the lowest and most contingent. This view stems partly from the Marxist exploitation theory. Property is the means by which the capitalist class does labour out of its rightful claim to the whole social product ; a theory tingeing the thought even of many ostensible non-Marxists. It is, however, older than Marx, older than Proudhon, older even than Rousseau, who cursed the first fence-builder ; it is as old as human envy, and has thriven with envy's modern promotion to the rank of a virtue. regardless of its yield. So far as'he is concerned, the incentive lever bends in the planner's hand. If the extra income he could earn is taxed too heavily, he may refuse to earn at all and devote his energies to unpaid occupations of which the planners do not approve. Above all, he can choose whether to maintain his property or, at any stage of his lifetime, to run it down ; so that the State's authority to decide, and power to influence, the total of public consumption is reduced. To those believing in the supreme wisdom and omnicompetence of central authority, or at least in its radical superiority to the spontaneous interplay of individual decisions, the existence of unearned " incomes is indeed a lamentable anomaly. To anyone else this very freedom which it bestows, this curb which it effects on authority's pre- tensions, is its greatest justification.
That the enjoynient of unearned income (how -apologetically one writes the phrase!) has made possible the devoted perform- ance of unpaid public service and the disinterested pursuit of art and learning is, again, an argument with little appeal to the Socialist. Not merely the occasional officious J.P. or offensive Lady Bountiful, but the whole tribe of voluntary workers, were condemned by the late Harold Laski for " slimy blacklegging." That condemnation would stand unchanged even had no dis- credit ever been cast on the class of unearned-income-drawers by the pointless, ugly or downright pernicious forms in which some have chosen to embody the privileges of their position. No blackleg could be slimier, on this reckoning, than Florence Nightingale. It is the spectacle of somebody doing something for nothing which offends the tidy mind of the economic deter- minist' though to other kinds of ethical opinion, disinterested action has always appeared superior, and that which makes it possible a good thing.
Some Socialists do distinguish between property directly used by the owner and property merely yielding an income to an absentee, reserving the full blast of their disapproval for the latter. Were it not for the overriding need for all pawns 'to be mobile, it might, they concede, be theoretically permissible, even in a fully Socialist State, for people to own their own houses. But even in this limited field their view of the psychology of ownership has a curious and twisted incompleteness. They recognise in it only, that acquisitive element summed up in the phrase, significantly suggesting the envy-ridden immature ego: It's mine ; you shan't have it." That curious blend of pro- tectiveness and creative joy, pride and gratitude with which a farmer regards his land, or a fisherman his boat, is outside their comprehension. Yet it has been from time immemorial a dynamic and safeguarding force of enormous importance to progress and to stability, as well as to the individual human happiness of Owners.
It would be absurd to assimilate all property to the type of the personal, intimately known possession which is the almost persistal partner of its owner's labour or leisure. One does not transfer the sympathy felt for an evicted peasant to the tycoon who; in Stephen Leacock's story, " had to sell the Very bonds out of his desk." Nor, confronted with that splintering of different property rights and functions which characterises modem joint-stock organisation—and so the bulk of modern property—can one be certain that present legal forms correspond either to economic realities or to abstract justice. Least of all is it possible to defend a distribution of property which, enormously more unequal than that of income, leaves far the greater part of the people of Great Britain excluded from all but the faintest taste of the benefits which property brings.
A determination to encourage the wider distribution of those benefits is, however, very different from a condemnation of property itself. That wider distribution—the property-owning democracy—could be brought about without confiscatory measures by a reform of the death-duty system, by removal of the many artificial handicaps on small business, and by a mone- tary policy which encourages, instead of penalising, the mill saver who cannot afford an equity " hedge ' against inflation. It can be achieved—it will only be achieved—by those who combine a. genuine desire for social justice with a genuine desire for freedom ; a freedom not precariously based on the goodwill of an all-powerful State towards its employees, but solidly grounded on what used most appropriately to be called " an independence."
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