e only after the rise of capitalist industry, that societies
act both unfairly and unwisely when they limit opportunities of
economic enterprise. Hence every attempt to impose obligations as a
condition of the tenure of property or of the exercise of economic
activity has been met by uncompromising resistance. The story of the
struggle between humanitarian sentiment and the theory of property
transmitted from the eighteenth century is familiar. No one has
forgotten the opposition offered in the name of the rights of property
to factory legislation, to housing reform, to interference with the
adulteration of goods, even to the compulsory sanitation of private
houses. "May I not do what I like with my own?" was the answer to the
proposal to require a minimum standard of safety and sanitation from
the owners of mills and houses. Even to {22} this day, while an
English urban landlord can cramp or distort the development of a whole
city by withholding land except at fancy prices, English municipalities
are without adequate powers of compulsory purchase, and must either pay
through the nose or see thousands of their members overcrowded. The
whole body of procedure by which they may acquire land, or indeed new
powers of any kind, has been carefully designed by lawyers to protect
owners of property against the possibility that their private rights
may be subordinated to the public interest, because their rights are
thought to be primary and absolute and public interests secondary and
contingent.

No one needs to be reminded, again, of the influence of the same
doctrine in the sphere of taxation. Thus the income tax was excused as
a temporary measure, because the normal society was conceived to be one
in which the individual spent his whole income for himself and owed no
obligations to society on account of it. The death duties were
denounced as robbery, because they implied that the right to benefit by
inheritance was conditional upon a social sanction. The Budget of 1909
created a storm, not because the taxation of land was heavy--in amount
the land-taxes were trifling--but because it was felt to involve the
doctrine that property is not an absolute right, but that it may
properly be accompanied by special obligations, a doctrine which, if
carried to its logical conclusion, would destroy its sanctity by making
ownership no longer absolute but conditional.

{23}

Such an implication seems intolerable to an influenti