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Property and Inheritance. 
q 
may be doubted whether respect for property-rights, 
derived from a time when these were the typical 
forms of property, will indefinitely afford a support for 
the security of property rights of a very different order. 
In the second place, property rights based entirely 
on contract, unsupported by the actual possession 
of any material object, are liable to insidious attacks 
by the very authority by which they are created 
and maintained. The State makes them possible 
by its legislation and upholds them by its police 
power ; but by its legislation it is constantly modify- 
ing the content of property rights, and by its financial 
policy it is constantly altering their value. The 
Russian delegates at Genoa pointed out that, in 
extinguishing property-rights without compensation, 
the revolutionary government could cite the pre- 
cedent of the United States of America, which first 
extinguished property right in slaves, and, more 
recently, destroyed the value of property in breweries 
and distilleries, without any compensation; they 
might have pointed out that all the belligerent 
powers, by their inflationary policy, had at least 
halved, and in some cases extinguished, the value 
of their leading gilt-edged securities, without com- 
pensation and almost without comment. 
In the third place, property must be unstable so 
long as it is so unevenly distributed. The ideal of 
democratic equality may still be the ideal of a 
minority, but it is a growing minority, and the 
existing distribution of property is the most glaring 
denial of it. Whatever social justification the 
institution of property may possess—that it has a 
great potential value I shall try to show in a moment— 
the number of citizens who have actual experience 
of its benefits is too few to ensure the general apprecia- 
tion that is necessary to stability.