t 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