the hands of salaried
officials, and again the mass of property-owners is swollen by the
multiplication of _rentiers_ who put their wealth at the disposal of
industry, but who have no other connection with it. The change is
taking place in our day most conspicuously, perhaps, through the
displacement in retail trade of the small shopkeeper by the multiple
store, and the substitution in manufacturing industry of combines and
amalgamations for separate businesses conducted by competing employers.
And, of course, it is not only by economic development that such claims
are created. "Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong
came forth sweetness." It is probable that war, which in barbarous
ages used to be blamed as destructive of property, has recently created
more titles to property than almost all other causes put together.

Infinitely diverse as are these proprietary rights, they {67} have the
common characteristic of being so entirely separated from the actual
objects over which they are exercised, so rarified and generalized, as
to be analogous almost to a form of currency rather than to the
property which is so closely united to its owner as to seem a part of
him. Their isolation from the rough environment of economic life,
where the material objects of which they are the symbol are shaped and
handled, is their charm. It is also their danger. The hold which a
class has upon the future depends on the function which it performs.
What nature demands is work: few working aristocracies, however
tyrannical, have fallen; few functionless aristocracies have survived.
In society, as in the world of organic life, atrophy is but one stage
removed from death. In proportion as the landowner becomes a mere
_rentier_ and industry is conducted, not by the rude energy of the
competing employers who dominated its infancy, but by the salaried
servants of shareholders, the argument for private property which
reposes on the impossibility of finding any organization to supersede
them loses its application, for they are already superseded.

Whatever may be the justification of these types of property, it cannot
be that which was given for the property of the peasant or the
craftsman. It cannot be that they are necessary in order to secure to
each man the fruits of his own labor. For if a legal right which gives
$200,000 a year to a mineral owner in the North of England and to a
ground landlord in London "secures the