170   HISTORIC GROWTH OF MAN.

COLLECTIVE OWNERSHIP.   171

LAW OF OWNERSHIP. THERE MUST BE COLLECTIVE OWNERSHIP FOR ALL THINGS OF COLLECTIVE USE, AND PRIVATE OWNERSHIP FOR ALL THINGS OF PRIVATE OR PERSONAL USE.

This is the natural law. It bases ownership upon production and use. Those things which are used by one person alone should be owned by that person. This includes clothing, private rooms and many kinds of tools. In all these, each person has individual character, pecularities and tastes to gratify, and what is adapted to one person is not adapted to another.

All those things which are used together by two or more persons should be owned by them collectively. One person alone could not occupy and use a wellarranged house, and therefore should not own it. The 144 or 26o persons who occupy a mansion in harmonism would own it collectively. They would have common rights in the parlor, dining room, class room, library, court and yards. But each person has two or three private rooms, and these are furnished; the chairs, tables, seats, walls and draperies, in form and color, are in harmony with that person's character, tastes and employment.

The member owns these private rooms in a more complete sense than was ever the case in civilism. For he cannot be deprived of them. The town or the state government cannot take them away in payment for delinquent taxes. Houses and lands are never taxed. That would be folly. The taxes are levied on surplus and movable wealth. But houses and lands are not surplus wealth; they are needed for constant use. It would be as foolish to tax these as it would be to tax and take away the working tools

which a man needs for daily use. A wise government would not wish to do such short-sighted things as that. It would not cut off its own hands.

Property should mean that which is proper or appropriate to a person or persons. There should always be a fitness between the thing owned and the owner.

A highway, a road, a railway or a waterway, is used by the whole public, and they should be its owners. A farm can only be well cultivated by a group of people or a society, and it should be owned by them. Homes, temples, workshops, factories, storehouses, machinery, telephones or telegraphs, lands and highways of all kinds, are all used by a common public, and should therefore be owned collectively.

The city, the county, the state, or the nation, each owns property. For example, here is a street, Broadway or Drurv Lane, that is wholly within the city, it does not extend beyond it. Very well, the city then should own it, and the city engineer would supervise and keep it in repair. It would be absurd for the nation to own it, or to say that it owned the street. The national engineer could not possibly supervise all the streets in a hundred or a thousand cities. But he could supervise the comparatively few long railways or highways which extended through the length and breadth of a nation. Even this would require that he should have under him many groups of assistants, each of these having its allotted sections.

The collective ownership of all public utilities seems so natural, so just, so in harmony with all humane wisdom, that one may well wonder why it has been postponed so long. But selfishness blinds