Page:Studies in socialism 1906.djvu/81

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
Radicals and Private Property
31

professional groups, to the essential rights of every human being, the free play of all activities. Every capitalistic element will have disappeared; no man will be able to make use of another man to create dividends for himself, or profit, or an income, or rent.

But the new property in its vast complexity, national, communal, corporate, co-operative, will be, at the same time, individual; because no individual will be handed over to the tyranny of another individual or the tyranny of a group or of the nation; and the rights of each man will be guaranteed by contracts at once supple and precise, which, until common property is established, will represent private property in its final purged form.

So will be verified the conclusion of the historian, that our conception of property is to undergo still further modifications. And in this sense there is not a single searcher after truth, not a single scholar who is not working to prove the puerility of the Radical formula. In M. Sée's volume I read the long list of men of science, historians, workers in the archives and in the ancient charters, who have either gathered together or arranged or interpreted the documents he has used. And undoubtedly, among those men, there must be many who belong, or who think they belong, to the Conservative party, some even to the party of reaction. But all, no matter what their personal theories are, no matter what faith they hold,