CHAPTER I - PROPERTY THE MAIN CONDITION OF SURVIVAL. THE GENERAL PROPOSITION STATED

Summary

The Institution of Property has been a principal condition of man's survival in the struggle for existence.

He has been able to produce more wealth than was needed to satisfy the wants of the passing hour. Relative to the surplus wealth so created, there has grown up in man's mind the instinct of appropriation, in its fuller development, the legalised principle of property. This has been man's most potent weapon of self-preservation. Ethnologists and jurists can supply us with some of the details of the process, for the instinct which has made property a necessity in all civilised society has been curiously interwoven with fictions of custom, religion, and law. Still out of the obscurity which surrounds the history of primitive ideas one fact stands clearly forth, namely, that property owes its origin mainly to the compulsion which is laid on men, as well as on other creatures, to defend themselves from each other and from the hostile forces of nature. At the very outset of his career, as presented to us in history, man appears to be relinquishing the hand-to-mouth life of the animal, and to be already armed with this instinct, which has raised about him the structure of modern civilisation. Each step in human progress has involved a further reliance on the industry which produces wealth, on the principle of property which protects it, and also a wider departure from the conditions which give to animals an uncertain survival in the struggle for existence.