We Socialists say to you: “Look out for the gentlemen who are so fearful lest you shall lose the right to own private property. If you will observe carefully, you will note that they are the ones who own practically all of the private property. You have hopes, perhaps, but they have the property. Your hopes do not increase. Their property does. Besides, we have no desire to deny you the right to own private property. On the contrary, we want to make your right worth something. It is not worth anything now, because you don’t own anything and can’t own anything. You are kept too busy making a bare living.”
The imagination can picture no more seductive subject than the right to own private property. The right to own private property suggests the power to exercise the right. The power to exercise the right a little suggests the power to exercise it much. The power to exercise it much suggests the power to put the world at one’s feet; to reach out and get this, whatever it may be; to go there and get that, wherever it may be. Nothing that is of earth or on earth is beyond the dreams of one who owns enough private property. Therefore, the subject may be worth a little more than ordinary consideration.
What, then, is property? Let us look around us. One man has property in land. So far as the eye can see, maybe, the laws of the state defend him in his power to say: “This is mine. I bought it. I paid for it. No one can take it from me without my leave. No one may even pick a flower from the hillside, or a berry from a bush without my consent.”
Property in land may be called property in natural resources—property in things that man did not make.
Then there is property in things that man has made. Property in food, property in clothing, property in houses, and property in the mills and machinery with which food, clothing, houses and all other manufactured articles are made.
Now, why should anyone wish a property right in anything? Why should anyone wish to say of anything on earth: “This is mine. No one may take it from me without my leave. No one may even use it without my leave”?
Only that he may fully use and enjoy it. That is the only valid reason that lies behind the desire to own anything. Some things cannot be fully used and enjoyed unless they are exclusively within the control of those who use them. A home into which the world was at liberty to enter would be no home. It might be a lodging house or a hotel, but it would be no home. Therefore, there is a valid reason why each individual should exclusively control the house in which he lives. Such exclusive control may arise from private ownership, as we now understand the term, or it may arise from the right, guaranteed by the state, to exclusive control so long as its use is desired; but, from whatever it may arise, it should exist.
It is the shame of the present civilization that it does not exist. The great majority of human beings have not the exclusive control of the houses in which they live. Their clutch upon their habitations is of the flimsiest sort. The sickness of the father may deprive them of the power to pay rent and thus put them out. The ability of some other man to pay a greater rental may put them out. Any one of many incidents may deprive them of their right to exclusive control of their domiciles.
Exclusive control of the furnishings of a home is also necessary to their complete enjoyment. What is true of house furnishings is true of clothing. Anything, in fact, that is exclusively used by an individual cannot be completely enjoyed unless it is exclusively controlled by that individual.
Wherein lies the justice of permitting one individual to own that which he does not use and cannot use, but which some other individual must use? Why should Mr. Morgan and his associates be permitted to own the machinery with which the steel trust workers earn their living? Why should Mr. Rockefeller and his associates be permitted to own so many of the railroads with which railroad men earn their living? Why should one man be permitted to own block upon block of tenements, while block upon block of tenement-dwellers own no homes?