ly
indicating the amount of their possessions.

As in the case of any other strong native tendency, interference
with the instinct of acquisition, whether displayed by
the individual or the group, provokes often fierce anger and
bitter combat. The history of wars of aggrandizement
throughout the history of Europe are testimonies to the
efficacy of this instinct at least in the initiation of war.

The progress of civilization beyond its earliest states is
held, by some sociologists and economists, to be ascribed to
the power of the acquisitive instinct. The acquisition of
material wealth or capital, the development of the institution
of private property with its concomitant individual development
of land and natural resources is maintained by Lester
Ward to be of paramount importance in social advance:

... Objects of desire multiplied themselves and their possession
became an end of effort. Slowly the notion of property came into
being and in acquiring this, as history shows, the larger share of all
human energy has been absorbed. The ruling passion has for a
time long anterior to any recorded annals always been proprietary
acquisition.... Both the passion and the means of satisfying it were
conditions to the development of society itself, and rightly viewed
they have also been leading factors in civilization.[1]

[Footnote 1: Lester Ward: _The Psychic Factors of Civilization_, p. 156.]

There are many other motives to activity than acquisition,
but there are many evidences of its intense operation even in
modern society. Many men go on working long after they have
money enough to enable them to live in comfort, merely
for the further satisfaction of this impulse. "While in the
course of satisfaction of most other desires, the point of satiety
is soon reached, the demands of this one grow greater without
limit, so that it knows no satiety."[1]

[Footnote 1: McDougall: _loc. cit._, p. 323.]

The power of this tendency to personal acquisition and
possession seems an obstacle to all thoroughly communistic
forms of political and social organization. The conception of
a state where nobody owns anything, but where all is owned
in common--an idea which has been repeated in many modern
forms of socialism and communism, fails to note this powerful
human difficulty. Many socialist writers, it must be
noted, however, point out that they wish social ownership of
the means of production rather than of every item of person