ute rights of individuals. {51} The most obvious defense against
the assertion of one extreme was the assertion of the other. Because
Governments and the relics of feudalism had encroached upon the
property of individuals it was affirmed that the right of property was
absolute; because they had strangled enterprise, it was affirmed that
every man had a natural right to conduct his business as he pleased.
But, in reality, both the one assertion and the other are false, and,
if applied to practice, must lead to disaster. The State has no
absolute rights; they are limited by its commission. The individual
has no absolute rights; they are relative to the function which he
performs in the community of which he is a member, because, unless they
are so limited, the consequences must be something in the nature of
private war. All rights, in short, are conditional and derivative,
because all power should be conditional and derivative. They are
derived from the end or purpose of the society in which they exist.
They are conditional on being used to contribute to the attainment of
that end, not to thwart it. And this means in practice that, if
society is to be healthy, men must regard themselves not as the owners
of rights, but as trustees for the discharge of functions and the
instruments of a social purpose.

{52}

V

PROPERTY AND CREATIVE WORK

The application of the principle that society should be organized upon
the basis of functions, is not recondite, but simple and direct. It
offers in the first place, a standard for discriminating between those
types of private property which are legitimate and those which are not.
During the last century and a half, political thought has oscillated
between two conceptions of property, both of which, in their different
ways, are extravagant. On the one hand, the practical foundation of
social organization has been the doctrine that the particular forms of
private property which exist at any moment are a thing sacred and
inviolable, that anything may properly become the object of property
rights, and that, when it does, the title to it is absolute and
unconditioned. The modern industrial system took shape in an age when
this theory of property was triumphant. The American Constitution and
the French Declaration of the Rights of Man both treated property as
one of the fundamental rights which Governments exist to protect. The
English Revolution of 1688, undogmatic and