that the language is not expressive of the ideas and policy of the House committee, and it is amended. The bill is then reported back, with a recommendation that it pass. It is still a Senate bill, and goes on the calendar of the House under that heading. Should there be an amendment, the bill is reprinted, the omitted part having a line run through the word. Type specially cast for this purpose is used. If there be any thing added the words are printed in italics. During the course of a Congress many bills are reported. The House calendar in the last days of a Congress is usually a thick voluminous document, and it would be a matter of impossibility to dispose of all the bills which still remain on the calendar. It is customary, therefore, for the House to assign to the several important committees one or two days each for the consideration of the business which the committees deem most pressing. Only a few of the many bills can be selected to be pushed to a final passage. The claimant must still be on the alert to secure for his bill a place among those which shall be given this great favor. If his bill passes, it goes back to the Senate, with the amendments made by the House. A new complication arises if the Senate does not at once accede to these amendments, and a conference is then asked between the two Houses. The short session is near its close. Night sessions may be necessary - and they usually are for the purpose of getting the big appropriation bills through. But, nevertheless, desperation spurs the claimant on. He urges the conferrees to get together and settle their differences. Sometimes this is done quickly, and, even though a conference report is privileged and may be called up at any time for consideration, other conference reports are The pressing, and above all loom the appropriation bills and their innumerable conference reports. The private bill must wait its chance. representative in charge of the bill in the House solicits the speaker for recognition, and the name goes on the list at the foot of fifteen or twenty others, who in turn give way whenever the Sundry Civil, the Indian, or the Legislative and Executive appropriation conference reports come in. All these reports provoke discussion. Congress is drawing near its close, and yet the conference report on the private bill has not been called up. At last an opening is secured. The report is called up, adopted, and the member in charge rushes to the clerk's office to secure its speedy transmittal to the Senate. Perhaps the President and his Cabinet have already arrived at the Capitol, and are in the Red Room on the Senate side when the con| ference report comes to the Senate. It is there adopted, but the claimant must not relax his exertions. The act must then be enrolled, and the president of the Senate and the speaker of the House must affix their signatures to the parchment. This means that the secretary of the Senate must 'message' the bill to the House. It is hurriedly signed and 'messaged' back to the Senate. Already the clock that is supposed to mark the hour of twelve, mid-day, when the session of Congress ceases, has been turned back two or three times, in order to get the bill before the President. The senator who has had charge of the bill goes with the chairman of the committee on enrolled bills, who carries all the bills passed by the Senate to the President. No time has been given to compare the bill as enrolled with the copy of the bill as it came out of the conference committee. It may be full of errors, for, in the rush of copying, grave mistakes are often made which vitiate the full force and effect of the bill; but that is a chance which the private claimant must take. When the act is laid before the President, a few hurried words, needed to explain the purport. of the bill, are spoken. If they are not satisfactory, a 'pocket veto' follows, which means that the President has declined to approve the law, and it therefore dies with the Congress. This frequently happens. But if the President is satisfied, he affixes his signature, his executive private secretary records the number of the bill in his book, and then rushes out of the doorway to appear calmly in front of the president of the Senate and announce that the President The has approved Senate bill No. 4,896. private bill has become a law, and the claimant is at rest. In Krecker v. Shirey, decided in the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, it was held that the laws of an ecclesiastical body will be recognized and enforced by the civil courts if not in conflict with the Constitution or the laws of the State. PROPERTY-ITS RIGHTS AND DUTIES IN Address delivered before the New York State Bar Association, at Albany, January 15, 1895, by Hon. JOHN F. DILLON. FROM CONSTITUTIONAL GUARANTIES. ROM the first settlement of this country the right of private property, in both lands and chattels, has been recognized. It was expressly recognized in the charters of the colonies. The charters and Constitutions of the original States contained in general or specific terms provisions for the security of property, as well as of life and liberty. As new States were formed and admitted into the Union, the Constitution of each contained similar guaranties. Contracts between individuals are property. and their inviolability has been also secured by the organic law. Accordingly, the Constitution of each State of the American Union contains in terms or substance these provisions: "No person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law." "Private property shall not be taken for public use without just compensation;" which means, as we all know, that private property shall not be compulsorily taken at all for private purposes, and that when taken for public use the compensation must be actual or in money. In the organic law of almost every State is the provision, borrowed from the Federal Constitution, that the Legislature shall not impair the obligation of contracts. These are limitations upon the States. THE ESSENTIAL FOUNDATIONS OF OUR SOCIAL It was on these foundations that our government was laid. It was believed that these principles were those best adapted to insure civil security and social and individual welfare. These foundation-principles assert and imply the right of every man to enjoy personal liberty, to work out in his own way, withenjoy, without molestation or impairment, the fruits out State domination, his individual destiny, and to of his own labor. Until lately the conviction among that these great primordial rights, including the all our people has been general and unquestioned, right of private property, whether gained by one's own toil or acquired by inheritance or will, were protected and made firm and secure by our republican system of government. Such is the established social order. But in our own day, the utility as well as the rightfulness of these fundamental principles are drawn in question by combined attacks upon them and upon the social fabric that has been builded upon them. This assault upon society as now organized is made by bodies of men who call themselves, and are variously called, communists, socialists, anarchists, or by like designations. Presumably movements of the magnitude which these organizations have attained, have some reason for their existence. They cannot be put down by denunciatory epithets, and are entitled to serious consideration as being at all events an organized protest of large numbers of men against the existing social order. This is a wide subject. I shall make no attempt to discuss it in all its breadth. In the Federal Constitution similar limitations My studies have not been such that I would feel exist upon the powers of the general government. competent to do so. One common principle, howFor, by the Fifth Amendment, it is ordained that ever, underlies and pervades all of these various "No person shall be deprived of life, liberty or movements, and that is that the institution of priproperty without due process of law; nor shall private property is wrong and ought to be abolished vate property be taken for public use without just or essentially curtailed. I confine myself to this compensation." And in the original Constitution aspect of the subject. it was ordained "That no State shall pass any law impairing the obligation of contracts." As a result of the experience of eighty years of national life came the great provision, born of the travail of our civil conflict, known as the Fourteenth Amendment. This placed the fundamental rights of life, liberty and property in the several States of the Union under the ultimate protection of the national government, for it ordained: "Section 1. Nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the law." Even in this assemblage of learned and distinguished lawyers, judges and legislators, this reference to the more important constitutional guaranties of private property and private contracts, will stand excused, for they constitute the basis of any consideration of the legal rights and legal duties of the owners of property, and they have also an important bearing upon the other aspect of the subject to which I shall refer, namely, the place of property in our social, as well as our legal system. While I do not deny that there is much in our social, industrial, and economic conditions that ought, if possible, to be improved, yet I maintain that the existing social order is sound at the core, and that the remedies proposed which involve, among other consequences, denial of the right of private property, or of its full enjoyment are radically pernicious, or Utopian. While I shall insist that private property is rightful, beneficial and necessary to the general welfare, and that all attempts to pillage or destroy it under whatever guise or pretext are as baneful as they are illegal, I shall insist with equal earnestness upon the proposition that such property is under many and important duties toward the State and society, which the owners too generally fail fully to appreciate. SOCIALISTIC ATTACKS ON PRIVATE PROPERTY. At the outset let us see whether the statement that these associations question the right of private property and seek its abolition or essential impairment is justified, and at the same time let us also observe what they propose to do with it or substitute for it. "Communism," says the author of the Karl Mark, the founder of German social democarticle on that subject in the last edition of the racy and a man of great intellectual ability, declared Encyclopedia Britannica, "is the name that has that "the foundation of the capitalistic method of been given to the schemes of social innovation production is to be found in that theft which dewhich have for their starting point the attempted prived the masses of their rights in the soil, in the overthrow of the institution of private property." earth, the common heritage of all."4 And so holds "Socialism" is of various types, but in its original Lassalle. The more moderate Rodbertus limits the and pure form as it exists on the continent of Eu- rightfulness of private property "to income alone." 5 rope and generally elsewhere, the abolition of pri- The "socialistic working-man's party," representvate property in lands and of the means of producing 25,000 members, declared themselves in 1875 in tion is one of the declared ends in view, and the the Gotha Congress, among other things, in favor substitution of an economic system in which pro- | of "the transformation of the instruments of labor duction is to be carried on in common under State control or supervision, for the common benefit, on some supposed equitable principle of distribution. This was the scheme of St. Simon, the earliest advocate of pure socialism. Proudhon, the great anarch of French socialism, declared in 1840 his hostility to property and property owners in language whose intense ferocity has made it world-famous. "What is property?" he asked; and he answered, "Property is theft" (La propriété, c'est vol), and "property owners are thieves." The moderate branch of Belgian socialists advocate the national ownership of land, and as a means of effecting the change favor four measures, which are so suggestive and bear so strongly upon some views which I shall presently present that I quote them in this connection: 1. Abolition of collateral inheritances. "2. Proclamation of the liberty of bequest. "3. A tax of twenty-five per centum upon all inheritances. "4. Enlightenment of the masses so that they shall soon demand the collectivity of the soil, or, as the English say, the nationalization of land." Such also are the demands of the "Belgian Labor Party" formed in 1885. That party "looks to the triumph of the political and social system known as Collectivistic Socialism. The fundamental principle of this system is common or collective ownership of all of the means of production, especially of capital and land. These to be attained through a series of partial and preparatory reforms: such as compulsory primary instruction; the attribution of corporate rights to workingmen's unions; accident, sickness and old age insurance; State ownership of the coal mines; the labor contract; limitation of the hours of labor; suppression of collateral inheritance, and a heavier tax upon direct inheritance." 3 into the common property of society," and "demanded the establishment of socialistic productive associations with State help under democratic control of the laboring people." Encyclopedia Britannica, article "Socialism." Mr. Kirkup, the intelligent author of the article on socialism in the Encyclopedia Britannica and of a work entitled, "An Inquiry into Socialism," 1887, and who represents what may be called the moderate type of English socialism, while insisting that there is nothing in the fundamental principles of socialism in conflict with what is good in existing social institutions, yet admits that socialism contemplates "a new form of social organization based on a fundamental change in the economic order of society." In his view, socialism is "in economics the principle of co-operation or association," and looks to replacing the present economic order "by an economic system in which industry will be conducted with a collective capital and by associated labor and with a view to an equitable system of distribution." 6 Even in this modified and moderate form, socialism involves a substantial overthrow of the existing social system and, it would seem, the abolition of private property in land and in the means of production. So far as these various forms of social organizations represent dissatisfaction with the existing economic conditions and seek by peaceful means to improve those conditions, they are open to no criticism. They have been the means of effecting much good in securing the recognition of the unrestricted right of labor combination; shortening the hours of labor; the prohibition of Sunday labor, and of the employment of young children; securing the sanitary inspection of factories and workshops, and in many other ways promoting the welfare and interests of laborers and employes. But so far as these movements challenge the rightfulness of the fundamental basis of the existing political and social system, and advocate the reconstruction of society on the basis of the destruction or impairment of individual liberty and of private property and the substitution of State ownership of land and of the means of economic production, they are founded on illusory or false and pernicious principles, and merit general condemnation. Much, doubtless, there is Ely, French and German Socialism, pp. 181, 202. 4 5 6 Pol. Science Quar., Vol. 3, p. 363. in existing social, economic and industrial conditions independence gave us vast tracts of unoccupied terwhich demands the most thoughtful consideration ritory beyond the Alleghanies. The history of the with a view to improve the condition of the poor or conquest and settlement of this remote and almost laboring class. But history and experience confirm unexplored wilderness, involving wars with Indians the conclusions of reason, that the present social and struggles with nature, need not be here related. order, founded upon the doctrine of individual If one wishes to refresh his memory on this subject, liberty, on the right freely to engage in any lawful let him read the graphic story of the settlement of business for profit, and on the institution of private | Kentucky, Ohio and the country beyond, in Mr. property, is destined to stand, and that all useful Theodore Roosevelt's late work, "The Winning of reforms and improvements in our social and econo- the West." The pioneer went out with his rifle on mic conditions can be better accomplished by graft- his shoulder, and “before the land could be settled ing them "on the old plant of private property, it had to be won." So in the region beyond the than by rooting it up altogether and planting the Mississippi, the Missouri and the Rocky Mountains, seedling of communism or socialism in its stead." acquired from France. For forty years of my life RIGHTFULNESS AND UTILITY OF PRIVATE OWNERI lived on the Mississippi, in a country just acSHIP OF LAND AND OTHER PROPERTY. quired from savages, where I have seen the process ered with white canvas, containing the pioneer's of settlement constantly going on. A wagon covfamily and nearly all his earthly possessions, penetrated into a new and, in the main, timberless region. A cabin of logs, a sod house, or a "dugout" on the side of a hill forms the first habitation, and years of labor were necessary to transform it into a comfortable home and make the land productive and valuable. and toils of these pioneers and early settlers, I have Witnessing the hardships. been constrained a hundred times to say, although land was given by the government or sold for the small sum of $1.25 per acre, that in creating and establishing homes thereon under such circumstances, they earned it many fold. It is thus seen that the main point of socialistic attack is upon the rightfullness of private ownership of land. The main ground of attack is the specious proposition that land is in its nature common wealth, and ought to remain common to all the people, and that private ownership of property of any kind, if admissible at all, should be limited to property which is the direct and exclusive product of the individual labor that creates or produces it, and such ownership cannot rightfully extend to any value which it derives from the general growth of the community. This precise form of attack in terms limited to land, but in principle not capable of limitation to this species of property, takes for its euphemistic motto a demand for the nationalization of land, and for its ground and reason the assumption that land has been converted into private ownership by force or fraud or other indefensible means. This assumption, especially in our own country, is without the slightest foundation in fact. Our whole history, colonial, State, and national, istled and unchallenged policy of the government convincing proof of the rightfulness as well as of utility of private ownership of land. After the discovery of America this vast continent was in a state of nature, sparsely occupied by barbarous tribes. Colonies were founded with the greatest difficulty, and involved a warfare with nature and savages. Land and its ownership was the great and only efficient inducement to colonization and settlement. At that time nobody dreamed that the ownership of land thus acquired was open to the slightest impeachment on ethical, political, or any other grounds. The hardships and difficulties of the New England, and, indeed, all of the Atlantic colonists and settlers need not be recounted. They are matters of familiar history. PUBLIC POLICY OF THE UNITED STATES RESPECTING Let it also be remembered that such ownership of the land has been acquired under an uniform, set originated and approved by the people themselves. The wise policy was early adopted by the general government of selling the public lands at almost nominal prices, and afterward the still wiser policy of giving them away under the Homestead Act, in order that they might be occupied and cultivated in limited parcels by a large body of owners, and not by tenants. I deny that this was either an unjust or a mistaken policy. I maintain, on the contrary, that it was a policy founded on the profoundest wisdom-the wisdom of having the landed domain broken up into small holdingss, and finding its way into the hands of owners, who have thus the highest motive to develop and improve it, and a conscious and permanent interest in the government from which it was acquired, and by which it is protected. It is the real counterpoise of universal suffrage. It is to-day our great bulwark against the revolutionary schemes of socialism. This policy of late years has been questioned by socialistic doctrinaires, and not long since I observed in one of their publications a lament that the United States years of self-denial, privation and toil by the pro-gions which now constitute forty prosperous States had not retained the ownership of all the vast reprietor and his family. The establishment of our In considering this subject, let it be remembered that land in a state of nature is of little value. It must be reclaimed. Forests must be felled, wild beasts extirpated, savage tribes kept at bay, mines opened, fields plowed, fenced and cultivated, habitations erected; and to bring wild land into a productive state, and to make it of value, involved of the Union, occupied by multiplied thousands of individual owners, and leased the land instead of selling it. But I deny that it is better to have a land of tenants, though the landlord be the government, than a land of owners. Let me illustrate the wisdom of our policy of facilitating and encouraging the private ownership of land by two or three extracts from the celebrated travels of Arthur Young in France just before the French Revolution, which bring out very strikingly what he so aptly describes as "the magic of property." Under date of July 29, 1787, he writes: Leaving the rocky country of Sauve, these active husbandmen who turn their rocks into scenes of fertility because, I suppose, their own, would do the same by the wastes if animated by the same omnipotent principle" of ownership. July 30. "The very rocks of this region are clothed with verdure. It would be a disgrace to common sense to ask the cause: the enjoyment of property must have done it. Give a man the secure possession of a bleak rock, and he will turn it into a garden; give him a nine years' lease of a garden, and he will convert it into a desert." Again, November 7, 1787. "Walk to Rosendale [in Flanders]. Between the town and that place are a great number of neat little houses on the Dunes, built each with its garden, and one or two fields inclosed of most wretched dune sand, naturally as white as snow, but improved by industry. The magic of property turns sand to gold.” Such theories are in conflict with the existing scheme of organized society, and if carried into execution destructive of it. It is not my purpose, nor have I the time, to enter into any extended argument to justify the principle or the institution of private property. Briefly it may be said that it is supported on three grounds-historically, as belonging to every civilization that has advanced beyond the early period of common ownership; ethically, as being mediately or immediately the acquest of labor; and, thirdly, on the ground of utility or the common good. Private property, rightfully acquired, accompanied and limited with just conceptions of its duties, has its justification and support in the nature of man, and the good of society. Man longs for individual ownership. Property therefore connects itself inseparably with the personality of its owner. His dominion over it arises from his personal rights in and concerning it. Properly and legally regarded, the rights of the owner are personal rights, and not that incomprehensible abstraction called the right of things. Ihering puts this in a striking way: "In making the object my own, I stamped it with the mark of my own person; whoever attacks it attacks me; the blow which strikes it strikes me, for I am present in it. Property is but the periphery of my person extended to things." Labor is the main element of the right. OccupaAnd why, let me ask, did the American colonist, tion is necessary in order to bestow labor upon it. pioneer and settler undergo these hardships and and the right of ownership and dominion springs make these sacrifices? What was the mainspring of from it, and is justified by labor, and possession is his action? What his controlling motive and real the essential prerequisite and condition of labor. purpose? The answer is obvious. It was to gratifyOnly through a lasting connection with labor," a want that is instinctive in the nature of man and which is rightful in all its depth and scope, as well as beneficent in its operation and results. That want is a spot of earth that a man can call his own --and which by the magic of his affections he can transform into a place dearer to him than all others -a home-a home for himself and his family, where he and they may live in security, and which dying he may transmit to those who are bound to him by says Ihering, "can property maintain itself fresh and healthy. Only at this source is it seen clearly and transparently to the very bottom to be what it is to man." "Communism thrives only in those quagmires in which the true idea of property is lost. At the source of the stream it is not found."9 The institution of private property, moreover, is justified by its utility. It arouses man from his the sacred ties of blood and affection. He has thus natural inertia and love of ease; it induces selfa title to the land, whether in town or country, denial, and is the only motive that is certain to en. which rests upon an indisputable foundation of jus-list his ambition and activity, and to call forth the tice, as well as of sound public policy. The opportunity thus to acquire it was equally open to all; it was acquired by the consent of all; its acquisition wronged no one and was beneficial to all, and I insist that such an owner has the highest of all titles. namely, that its real and substantial value came from the sweat of his own brow, aud is the product of his own labor. And now we are met by the teachers and advocates of socialistic theories who say that all this is wrong, that such ownership is theft; that land belongs of inalienable right to all the people and that it or its full enjoyment ought to be shared by all; and so, on the same principle, as to all other property of whatsoever nature, at least all property which has a productive value—that is, property which yields a return without manual labor bestowed upon it. highest exercise of his powers. Viewed from a mere social or economic standpoint, the man who subdues the wilderness, and by his labor converts a waste into a productive land, makes the field bloom and blossom into the harvest, does not injure, but benefits, his fellow-men. The benefits to the indi vidual from the ownership thus acquired, and the labor thus bestowed, overflow the boundaries of private proprietorship and inure to the advantage of the whole community. Such a proprietor is a benefactor, and not a robber. The community owes him as much as he owes the community. The Struggle for Law (Am. ed.), 55; Pol. Sci. Quar., vol. 1, p. 604. Thering Struggle for Law (Am. ed.), pp. 49, 50; Pol. Sci. Quar., vol. 1, p 605. |