nd Jails; Agriculture, Mining and
Forestry; Corporations, Trusts and Interstate Commerce. Is it not
possible to begin with a broader and more simple division?
Now, all statutes are limitations on a state of pure individualism,
defining this latter word to mean a state of society recognizing
personal liberty and private property, and allowing all possible
freedom of action and contract relating thereto; with a court
administration for the purpose of protecting such liberty and
enforcing such contracts in the courts. The usual rough division of
our constitutional rights, following the phraseology of the Fourteenth
Amendment, is that of life, liberty, and property; but the rights to
life and liberty obviously belong to the same broad field. Our first
division, therefore, may well be that which divides life and liberty
rights from property rights; although in some cases, notably in the
earnings of labor, they would be found to run together. Liberty rights
are multifarious and indefinite; we may, therefore, first take the
field of property as presenting, after all, a more simple subject.
Considering all possible organizations of human society from this
point of view, we shall find that all may be expressed, all at least
that have hitherto been conceived, under the systems of anarchism,
individualism, and socialism, these words expressing all possible
states of human society when expressed in terms of individual liberty,
that is to say, the free exercise of the individual will. Either
one of these may exist either with or without the notion of private
property; though, of course, one's action as to property would be
controlled under a system of socialism, and property itself would have
no legal protection under a system of anarchism. Nevertheless, the
notion of property might still exist and be recognized by the custom
of mankind without any sanction or enforcement from the entire
community, _i.e._, what people call the state. When we are speaking in
terms of property, we use the word _communism_--meaning that state of
society where the conception of property exists, but the law or custom
will not recognize individualism. Communism, therefore, usually
implies ownership by the entire community, while in anarchism there is
no property at all. There has been much confusion in the use of these
terms in the popular mind, and even in ordinary writing. Many people
have confounded, for instance, socialism with anarchism or nihilism,
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