There were others, however, who judged it altogether too fantastical. The most interesting of his opponents was a certain Antonio Roselli, a very judiciously-minded civil lawyer, who goes very thoroughly into the point at issue. He gives Innocent's views, and quotes what authority he can find for them in the Digest and Decretals. But for himself he would prefer to admit that the right to private property is not at all sacred or natural in the sense of being inviolable. He willingly concedes to the State the right to judge all claims of possession. This is the more startling since ordinarily his views are extremely moderate, and throughout the controversy between Pope and Emperor he succeeded in steering a very careful, delicate course. To him, however, all rights to property were purely civil and arguable only on principles of positive law. There was no need, therefore, to discriminate between the right and its exercise, for both equally could be controlled by the State. There are evidences to show that he admitted the right of each man to the support of his own life, and, therefore, to private property in the form of actual food, &c., necessary for the immediate moment; but he distinctly asserts as his own personal idea that "the prince could take away my right to a thing, and any exercise of that right," adding only that for this there must be some cause. The prince cannot arbitrarily confiscate property; he must have some reasonable motive of sufficient gravity to outweigh the social inconveniences which confiscation would necessarily produce. Not every cause is a sufficient one, but those only which concern "public liberty or utility." Hence he decides that the Pope cannot alienate Church lands without some justifying reason, nor hand them over to the prince unless there happens to be an urgent need, springing from national circumstances. It does not follow, however, that he wishes to make over to the State absolute right to individual property under normal conditions. The individual has the sole dominion over his own possessions; that dominion reverts to the State only in some extreme instance. His treatise, therefore (Goldast, De Monarchia, 1611-1614, Hanover, p. 462, &c.), may be looked upon as summing up the controversy as it then stood. The legal distinction suggested by Innocent IV had been given up by the lawyers as insufficient. The theories of Du Bois, Wycliff, Ockham, and the others had ceased to have much significance, because they gave the royal power far too absolute a jurisdiction over the possessions of its subjects. The feudal contractual system, which these suggested reforms had intended to drive out, had failed for entirely different reasons, and could evidently be brought back only at the price of a complete and probably unsuccessful disturbance of the social and economic organisation. The centralisation which had risen on the ruins of the older local sovereignties and immunities, had brought with it an emphasised recognition of the public rights and duties of all subjects, and had at the same time confirmed the individual in the ownership of his little property, and given him at the last not a conditional, but an absolute possession. To safeguard this, and to prevent it from becoming a block in public life, a factor of discontent, the lawyers were engaged in framing an additional clause which should give to the State an ultimate jurisdiction, and would enable it to overrule any objections on the part of the individual to a national policy or law. The suggested distinction that the word "right" should be emptied of its deeper meaning, by refusing it the further significance of "exercise," was too subtle and too legal to obtain much public support. So that the lawyers were driven to admit that for a just cause the very right itself could be set aside, and every private possession (when public utility and liberty demanded it) confiscated or transferred to another.
Even the right to compensation for such confiscation was with equal cleverness explained away. For it was held that, when an individual had lost his property through State action, and without his having done anything to deserve it as a punishment, compensation could be claimed. But whenever a whole people or nation was dispossessed by the State, there was no such right at all to any indemnity.
Thus was the wholesale adoption of land-nationalism to be justified. Thus could the State capture all private possessions without any fear of being guilty of robbery. It was considered that it was only the oppression of the individual and class spoliation which really contravened the moral law.
The legal theories, therefore, which supplanted the old feudal concepts were based on the extension of royal authority, and the establishment of public rights. Individualistic possession was emphasised; yet the simultaneous setting up of the absolute monarchies of the sixteenth century really made their ultimate capture by the Socialist party more possible.
CHAPTER VI
THE SOCIAL REFORMERS
It may seem strange to class social reforms under the wider heading of Socialistic Theories, and the only justification for doing so is that which we have already put forward in defence of the whole book; namely, that the term "socialistic" has come to bear so broad an interpretation as to include a great deal that does not strictly belong to it. And it is only on the ground of their advocating State interference in the furtherance of their reforms that the reformers here mentioned can be spoken of as socialistic.
Of course there have been reformers in every age who came to bring to society their own personal measures of relief. But in the Middle Ages hardly a writer took pen in hand who did not note in the body politic some illness, and suggest some remedy. Howsoever abstruse might be the subject of the volume, there was almost sure to be a reference to economic or social life. It was not an epoch of specialists such as is ours. Each author composed treatises in almost every branch of learning. The same professor, according to mediaeval notions, might lecture to-day on Scripture, to-morrow on theology or philosophy, and the day after on natural science. For them a university was a place where each student learnt, and each professor taught, universal knowledge. Still from time to time men came to the front with some definite social message to be delivered to their own generation. Some were poets like Langland, some strike-leaders like John Ball, some religious enthusiasts like John Wycliff, some royal officials like Pierre du Bois.
This latter in his famous work addressed to King Edward I of England (De Recuperatione Sancte Terre), has several most interesting and refreshing chapters on the education of women. His bias is always against religious orders, and, consequently, he favours the suppression of almost every conventual establishment. Still, as these were at his own date the only places where education could be considered to exist at all, he had to elaborate for himself a plan for the proper instruction of girls. First, of course, the nunneries must be confiscated by Government. For him this was no act of injustice, since he regarded the possessions of the whole clerical body as something outside the ordinary laws of property. But having in this way cleared the ground of all rivals, and captured some magnificent buildings, he can now go forward in his scheme of education. He insists on having only lay-mistresses, and prescribes the course of study which these are to teach. There should be, he held, many lectures on literature, and music, and poetry, and the arts and crafts of home life. Embroidery and home-management are necessities for the woman's work in after years, so they must be acquired in these schools. But education cannot limit itself to these branches of useful knowledge. It must take the woman's intelligence and develop that as skilfully as it does the man's. She is not inferior to him in power of reason, but only in her want of its right cultivation. Hence the new schools are to train her to equal man in all the arts of peace. Such is the main point in his programme, which even now sounds too progressive for the majority of our educational critics. He appeals for State interference that the colleges may be endowed out of the revenues of the religious houses, and that they may be supported in such a fashion as would always keep them abreast of the growing science of the times. And when, after a schooling of such a kind as this, the girls go out into their life-work as wives and mothers, he would wish them a more complete equality with their men-folk than custom then allowed. The spirit of freedom which is felt working through all his papers makes him the apostle of what would now be called the "new woman."