To the Editor of Liberty:

Your rejoinder to my communication on the reward of authors was a surprise to me. You aver that you must begin by repudiating the standpoint from which I start, vaguely alluding to principles of social conduct which you say are matters of discovery. But a mere assertion of opinion that a certain rule or act of conduct is proper or improper, without tracing the assertion to fundamental laws, will not satisfy my mind.

Heretofore I have based my conclusions on the experience that in nature the strong prevails over the weak, if he so chooses; that by association the weak can create an entity of superior strength; and that man strives to gratify his desires with the least exertion, and selects that course of action that in his judgment will give him the most pleasure and cause the least distress. On the basis of these axioms I can follow Spencer’s derivation of the proposition that, if a people desire to enjoy the greatest happiness, they must unite and restrct men’s liberty whenever, and only when, such liberty infringes the equal liberty of others. But whenever I find a reputed application of this law which is in conflict with the original axioms, I conclude it must be due to a misinterpretation of that proposition. If you base your doctrine on other fundamental principles capable of discovery, I shall be glad to learn, and I may then possibly be in a position to adopt your views, which now appear to me not sufficiently consistent to be acceptable. However, judging from what I have read in Liberty, I have reason to believe we stand on identical fundamental ground, and that we disagree only on propositions deduced therefrom, one of us having arrived at erroneous conclusions. Permit me to give my reasons for believing that you are the one whose logic is at fault; and if I am mistaken, I shall be glad to accept your explanation and to amend my views.

In your editorial of December 27 you quote from the Standard, and you say, to a certain point, you agree with Henry George. These are some of the assertions: Ownership comes from production. It cannot come from discovery. Discovery can give no right of ownership. . . . Then, speaking of patent rights: In this we seek by special laws to give a special reward to labor expended in discovery, which does not belong to it of natural right, and is of the nature of a bounty. But as for labor expended in the second of these modes,—in the production of the machine,—. . . we need no special laws to reward that.

If these assertions are placed in contrast with the following, I have no doubt as to which you will accept and which reject.

Ownership is the result of the adoption and enforcement of the precept, Thou shalt not steal, whether accepted by the people by tacit or by express agreement. It is accepted because of the experience that by its enforcement the people at large can gratify their desires with the least exertion, other things equal. The producer being the first possessor, the rule nominally secures the produce to the producer; but this object has for some reason or other never been attained in any civilized society, the principal methods of evasion being the acquisition, by idlers, of rent and interest. Whether a discovery can be the subject of ownership depends on the interpretation of the concept steal. Whenever the supreme power grants to a person the exclusive right to use a discovery, that person is the owner of the discovery. In the abstract, a difference between the ownership of a concrete product and that of a discovery does not exist. Property in a concrete thing is no more natural than property in a discovery. Both concepts are of a social or specifically human origin. Without specific laws, tacit or express, a right of ownership of any description cannot exist.

This exposition of the right of property is radically different from that of Henry George. It is a description of the means to attain a given end, while Henry George confounds the end to be attained with the means of attaining it. The definition of the concept ownership need not take into account whether the grant of the right is equitable or otherwise, nor whether it is of a permanent or transient nature. The question of equity and permanency cannot be discussed before an agreement regarding the fundamental concepts is reached. Therefore, before replying to any of the points of controversy raised in your rejoinder, I wish to know whether, after this exposition of my fundamental standpoint, you still hold that you must begin by repudiating the same.

Hugo Bilgram.

Philadelphia, January 19, 1891.

Mr. Bilgram’s use, or rather non-use, of the law of equal liberty is laughable in the extreme. A generalization from known and long-observed phenomena seems to have no value for him as a guide. A comparison of the various forms of the conduct of men in relation to their fellows in the fields where these forms have been the most thoroughly tested has revealed the fact that the proportion in which these forms make for happiness corresponds in the long run very exactly to the proportion in which they observe and preserve equality of liberty. Centuries of experience have so established this fact to the satisfaction of the greatest political philosophers of today that they consider this generalization as a social law, and use it as a test of proposed policies in fields untried or comparatively unexplored. If it is not to be used in this way, it is useless, or nearly so. To serve as such a test, and to do away with the necessity of empirical observation in each new case, is the main function of a generalization. But Mr. Bilgram has no such use for it. He believes it a true generalization, but he refuses to test anything by it. If the test is made by others, and the new phenomenon seems to stand the test, no effect is produced upon him. If he, notwithstanding the lack of knowledge of the new and special case that has arisen, and notwithstanding the absence or limited quantity of experience in the field in which it has arisen, thinks he foresees results which would show that the test has been misapplied, he feels justified in asserting this misapplication, without specifying, or attempting to specify wherein the misapplication consists. He places his fancied prescience above other men’s science. The question having arisen whether property in ideas is to be recognized, Mr. Bilgram refuses to answer those people who point out that such property is, in principle, inconsistent with equal liberty, and says that, because in his opinion the denial of property in ideas would leave us without a literature (although there is not the slightest proof of this, such evidence as there is tending rather the other way) and would therefore make for unhappiness, this form of property must be consistent with equal liberty. So far as yet appears, he is unable to point out any flaw in the reasoning which shows it to be inconsistent, but he is sure there must be a flaw, not on the strength of any actual experience, but simply on the strength of experience that he looks for in the future. If generalizations are to be treated in this way, any prohibitionist or protectionist might well swear, with the rest of us, by the law of equal liberty. The prohibitionist, to justify a prohibitory law, need only point out that in his opinion free rum would lead to universal drunkenness in order to show that it is not prohibition, but free rum, that is inconsistent with the law of equal liberty. Such reasoning would make a horse laugh.

So much for the first half of Mr. Bilgram’s letter now for the second.

[8] This matter of the right of ownership I canvassed with Mr. Bilgram in Liberty of August 2, 1890, and I have reason to complain of him for compelling me to say the same thing twice. His remarks on ownership in the present letter are substantially the same as those in his letter of last August, and, in the absence of any new considerations, I refuse to answer them save as I answered them then. Hence I reprint an extract. Mr. Bilgram having defined the right of ownership as that relation between a thing and a person created by the social promise to guarantee possession, and having added that this implies the existence of a social organization, however crude, and a supreme power to enforce the command, Thou shalt not steal, I made this rejoinder:

In the thought that I take to be fundamental in Mr. Bilgram’s argument—namely, that there is no right, from the standpoint of society, other than social expediency—I fully concur. But I am equally certain that the standard of social expediency—that is to say, the facts as to what really is expedient, and the generalizations from those facts which we may call the laws of social expediency—exists apart from the decree of any social power whatever. In accordance with this view, the Anarchistic definition of the right of ownership, while closely related to Mr. Bilgram’s, is such a modification of his that it does not carry the implication which his carries and which he points out. From an Anarchistic standpoint, the right of ownership is that control of a thing by a person which will receive either social sanction, or else unanimous individual sanction, when the laws of social expediency shall have been finally discovered. (Of course I might go further and explain that Anarchism considers the greatest amount of liberty compatible with equality of liberty the fundamental law of social expediency, and that nearly all Anarchists consider labor to be the only basis of the right of ownership in harmony with that law; but this is not essential to the definition, or to the refutation of Mr. Bilgram’s point against Anarchism.)

It will be seen that the Anarchistic definition just given does not imply necessarily the existence of an organized or instituted social power to enforce the right of ownership. It contemplates a time when social sanction shall be superseded by unanimous individual sanction, thus rendering enforcement needless. But in such an event, by Mr. Bilgram’s definition, the right of ownership would cease to exist. In other words, he seems to think that, if all men were to agree upon a property standard and should voluntarily observe it, property would then have no existence simply because of the absence of any institution to protect it. Now in the view of the Anarchists, property would then exist in its perfection.

The difference between Mr. Bilgram and me seems to be this: that he views everything from the standpoint of legality, and has no conception of legality as anything but an expression of will, not to say caprice; whereas I view everything from the standpoint of science, and have no use for legality at all save in the sense of applied political science.

I think that it must now be plain to Mr. Bilgram in what sense I repudiate his fundamental standpoint.

T.