and supposes in all others the duty and obligation to
respect it. The respect that goes as far as not relieving the owner of
his goods is not enough; it must safeguard him against all damage and
injury to said goods; otherwise his right is non-existent.

All violations of this right come under the general head of stealing.
People call it theft, when it is effected with secrecy and slyness;
robbery, when there is a suggestion of force or violence. The swindler
is he who appropriates another's goods by methods of gross deception or
false pretenses while the embezzler transfers to himself the funds
entrusted to his care. Petty thieving is called pilfering or filching;
stealing on a large scale usually has less dishonorable qualificatives.
Boodling and lobbying are called politics; watering stock, squeezing
out legitimate competition, is called financiering; wholesale
confiscation and unjust conquest is called statesmanship. Give it
whatever name you like, it is all stealing; whether the culprit be
liberally rewarded or liberally punished, he nevertheless stands
amenable to God's justice which is outraged wherever human justice
suffers.

Of course the sin of theft has its degrees of gravity, malice and
guilt, to determine which, that is, to fix exactly the value of stolen
goods sufficient to constitute a grievous fault, is not the simplest
and easiest of moral problems. The extent of delinquency may be
dependent upon various causes and complex conditions. On the one hand,
the victim must be considered in himself, and the amount of injury
sustained by him; on the other, justice is offended generally in all
cases of theft, and because justice is the corner stone of society, it
must be protected at all hazards. It is only by weighing judiciously
all these different circumstances that we can come to enunciate an
approximate general rule that will serve as a guide in the ordinary
contingencies of life.

Thus, of two individuals deprived by theft of a same amount of worldly
goods, the one may suffer thereby to a much greater extent than the
other; he who suffers more is naturally more reluctant to part with his
goods, and a greater injustice is done to him than to the other. The
sin committed against him is therefore greater than that committed
against the other. A rich man may not feel the loss of a dollar,
whereas for another less prosperous the loss of less than that sum
might be of the nature of a calamity. To take theref