Property and Inheritance. 
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extended from the movement of luxuries in small 
quantities to the exchange of necessaries in vast 
amounts between different continents. Legal devices 
for separating the ownership from the use and 
administration of capital became necessary, and 
reluctantly, and without any consciousness of the 
developments it was assisting, Parliament sanctioned 
joint stock companies with limited liability. 
This separation of the ownership and use of wealth 
is not, of course, confined to the last hundred years. 
Interests were charged upon landed estates, and, 
at an earlier period, wardships and marriage and 
other feudal incidents were just as “abstract” and 
“ functionless ’ forms of property as modem joint- 
stock securities. But recently this separation has 
grown, and, as it grew, has revolutionised the legal 
aspect of property. Property originally was the 
legal right to the use of a thing, a right exercised 
by the owner; then there developed a tendency to 
exchange this right for a money income charged on 
the thing, and to relinquish the use of the thing itself 
to the person who undertook to pay the money 
income ; latterly property has taken more and more 
the form of a bare right to money payments, obtained, 
not by forgoing the use of any particular concrete 
thing, but by transferring to the borrower the 
lender’s right to spend his unspent income, and 
secured, not by being charged on some particular 
thing which the borrower uses, but simply by the 
borrower’s undertaking to pay. 
With this separation it has become possible to 
disentangle the different interests in any object of 
property. Just as the worker no longer makes 
a thing, which is the reward of his labour when it is 
made, but contributes his labour to an unending 
productive process in return for a money payment 
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