352 A Short History of The World English poor law. The Neapolitan Campanella's City of the Sun was more fantastic and less fruitful. By the end of the seventeenth century we find a considerable and growing literature of political and social science was being pro- duced. Among the pioneers in this discussion was John Locke, the son of an English republican, an Oxford Scholar who first directed his attention to chemistry and medicine. His treatises on govern- ment, toleration, and education show a mind fully awake to the possibilities of social reconstruction. Parallel with and a little later than John Locke in England, Montesquieu (1689-1755) in France, subjected social, political, and religious institutions to a searching and fundamental analysis. He stripped the magical prestige from the absolutist monarchy in France. He shares with Locke the credit for clearing away many of the false ideas that had hitherto prevented deliberate and conscious attempts to reconstruct human society. The generation that followed him in the middle and later decades of the eighteenth century was boldly speculative upon the moral and intellectual clearings he had made. A group of brilliant writers, the " Encyclopaedists," mostly rebel spirits from the excellent schools of the Jesuits, set themselves to scheme out a new world (1766). Side by side with the Encyclopaedists were the Economists or Physio- crats, who were making bold and crude enquiries into the production and distribution of food and goods. Morelly, the author of the Code de la Nature, denounced the institution of private property and pro- posed a communistic organization of society. He was the precursor of that large and various school of coUectivist thinkers in the nine- teenth century who are lumped together as Socialists. What is Socialism ? There are a hundred definitions of Socialism and a thousand sects of Socialists. Essentially Socialism is no more and no less than a criticism of the idea of property in the light of the public good. We may review the history of that idea through the ages very briefly. That and the idea of internationalism are the two cardinal ideas upon which most of our political life is turning. The idea of property arises out of the combative instincts of the species. Long before men were men, the ancestral ape was a pro- prietor. Primitive property is what a beast will fight for. The dog and his bone, the tigress and her lair, the roaring stag and his herd, these are proprietorship blazing. No more nonsensical expression is conceivable in sociology than the term " primitive communism." The Old Man of the family tribe of early palaeolithic times insisted
