common for the general benefit. But when this time has arrived--and according to them it has
arrived--the legitimacy of private landed property, they contend, has ceased, and mankind at large
ought now to re-enter on their inheritance. They deny the claim of the first possessors to impose
fetters on all generations, and to prevent the species at large from resuming rights of which, for
good but temporary reasons, it had suspended the exercise. Society made the concession, and
society can at any moment take it back.
Again, the author, in his chapter on the Rights of Capital, very truly and forcibly argues, that these
are a portion of the rights of labour. They are the rights of past labour, since labour is the source of
all capital; and are sacred, in the same sense, and in an equal degree, with those of present labour.
From this he deduces the equal legitimacy of any contract for employment, which past labour may
impose on the necessities of present labour, provided there is no taint of force or fraud. But is there
no taint of force or fraud in the original title of many owners of past labour? The author states the
case as if all property, from the beginning of time, had been honestly come by; either produced by
the labour of the owner himself, or bestowed on him by gift or bequest from those whose labour did
produce it. But how stands the fact? Landed property at least, in all the countries of modern Europe,
derives its origin from force; the land was taken by military violence from former possessors, by
those from whom it has been transmitted to its present owners. True, much of it has changed hands
by purchase, and has come into the possession of persons who had earned the purchase-money by
their labour; but the sellers could not impart to others a better title than they themselves possessed.
Movable property, no doubt, has on the whole a purer origin, its first acquirers having mostly worked
for it, at something useful to their fellow-citizens. But, looking at the question merely historically, and
confining our attention to the larger masses, the doctrine that the rights of capital are those of past
labour is liable even here to great abatements. Putting aside what has been acquired by fraud, or by
the many modes of taking advantage of circumstances, which are deemed fair in commerce, though
a person of a delicate conscience would scruple to use them in most of the other concerns of life-
omitting all these considerations, how many of the great commercial fortunes have been, at least
partly, built up by practices which in a better state of society would have been impossible -- jobbing
contracts, profligate loans, or other abuses of Government expenditure, improper use of public
positions, monopolies, and other bad laws, or perhaps only by the manifold advantages which
imperfect social institutions gave to those who are already rich, over their poorer fellow-citizens, in
the general struggle of life? We may be told that there is such a thing as prescription, and that a bad
title may become a good one by lapse of time. It may, and there are excellent reasons of general
utility why it should; but there would be some difficulty in establishing this position from any a priori
principle. It is of great importance to the good order and comfort of the world that an amnesty should
be granted to all wrongs of so remote a date that the evidence necessary for the ascertainment of
title is no longer accessible, or that the reversal of the wrong would cause greater insecurity and
greater social disturbance than its condonation. This is true, but I believe that no person ever
succeeded in reconciling himself to the conviction, without doing considerable violence to what is
called the instinctive sentiment of justice. It is not at all conformable to intuitive morality that a wrong
should cease to be a wrong because of what is really an aggravation, its durable character; that
because crime has been successful for a certain limited period, society for its own convenience
should guarantee its success for all time to come. Accordingly, those who construct their systems of
society upon the natural rights of man, usually add to the word natural the word imprescriptible, and
strenuously maintain that it is impossible to acquire a fee-simple in an injustice.
Yet one more example, to show the ease with which conclusions that seem to follow absolutely from
an a priori theory of justice can be defeated by other deductions from the same premises. According
to the author, however inadequate the remuneration of labour may be, the labourer has no
grievance against society, because society is not the cause of the insufficiency, nor did society ever
bargain with him, or bind itself to him by any engagement, guaranteeing a particular amount of'
remuneration. And, this granted, the author assumes (at p. 394 and elsewhere) as a logical
consequence, that proprietors must not be interfered with, out of regard to the interests of labour, in
the perfectly free use of their property conformably to their own inclination. Now, if this point were
being argued as a practical question, on utilitarian grounds, there probably would be little difference
between Mr. Thornton's conclusions and my own. I should stand up for the free disposal of property
as strongly, and most likely with only the same limitations, as he would. But we are now on a priori
ground, and while that is the case, I must insist upon having the consequences of principles carried
out to the full. What matters it that, according to the author's theory, the employer does no wrong in
making the use he does of his capital, if the same theory would justify the employed in compelling
him by law to make a different use if the labourers would in no way infringe the definition of justice