Sec. 4] PROPERTY 23
known as wealth and property does not hold true. A thor-
ough examination of the case, however, will remove this
objection.
Sometimes wealth and property rights are so closely
associated as to be confused with each other, so that, un-
less one stops to consider the matter, the existence of the
two separate concepts would not be suspected. This is
true in the case of “fee simple,’ where a piece of
land is spoken of as a “piece of property.” For prac-
tical purposes, little objection can be raised to such popular
usage, but even in such cases strict accuracy requires that
the two ideas should be distinguished. The distinction is
more easily remembered if we employ the full phrase ““prop-
erty right.” A loaf of bread is concrete wealth, not a prop-
erty right; the right to eat it is the property. On the
other hand, in the more involved. cases of property rights,
we encounter the opposite difficulty. The danger here is in
separating the concepts of wealth and property too far,
so as to consider them as independent instead of interde-
pendent. When railway shares are sold in Wall Street, the
investor is prone to think of those shares as entirely de-
tached from any concrete wealth. It is unlikely that he
has ever seen or ever will see the steel rails, cars, and loco-
motives upon which those shares are based; and indeed,
the only concrete object of which he is likely to be dis-
tinctly conscious is the paper certificate itself. But if
is clear that this paper certificate is not itself the prop-
erty, but merely the written evidence of it and that the
railway shares, to be property, involve a real railway
(wealth) underneath.
That all wealth involves a property right is not likely
to be denied by any one; and that all property rights in-
volve underlying wealth should be equally evident. But
this is not the case. In fact, some of the most dangerous
fallacies which beset the business world, including many of
the sophisms of credit, are due to the difficulty of recog-
