state of
society to exist in which the three reasons could no longer be urged
seriously, then the necessity which they occasioned would also cease to
hold. In point of fact, St. Thomas was perfectly familiar with a social
group in which these conditions did not exist, and the law of individual
possession did not therefore hold, namely, the religious orders. As a
Dominican, he had defended his own Order against the attacks of those
who would have suppressed it altogether; and in his reply to William of
St. Amour he had been driven to uphold the right to common life, and
consequently to deny that private property was inalienable.

Of course it was perfectly obvious that for St. Thomas himself the idea
of the Commune or the State owning all the land and capital, and
allowing to the individual citizens simply the use of these common
commodities, was no doubt impracticable; and the three reasons which he
gives are his sincere justification of the need of individual ownership.
Without this division of property, he considered that national life
would become even more full of contention than it was already.
Accordingly, it was for its effectiveness in preventing a great number
of quarrels that he defended the individual ownership of property.

Besides this article, there are many other expressions and broken
phrases in which Aquinas uses the same phrase, asserting that the actual
division of property was due to human nature. "Each field considered in
itself cannot be looked upon as naturally belonging to one rather than
to another" (2, 2, 57, 3); "distinction of property is not inculcated by
nature" (1_a_, 2_ae_, 94, 5); but again he is equally clear in insisting
on the other proposition, that there is no moral law which forbids the
possession of land in severalty. "The common claim upon things is
traceable to the natural law, not because the natural law dictates that
all things should be held in common, and nothing as belonging to any
individual person, but because according to the natural law there is no
distinction of possessions which comes by human convention" (2_a_,
2_ae_, 66, 2_ad_ 1_m_.).

To apprehend the full significance of this last remark, reference must
be made to the theories of the Roman legal writers, which have been
already explained. The law of nature was looked upon as some primitive
determination of universal acceptance, and of venerable sanction, which
sprang from the roots of man's being. This in its ab