The origin and development of the moral ideas

THE right of property implies that a certain person or certain persons are recognised as having a right to the exclusive disposal of a certain thing. The owner is not necessarily allowed to do with his property whatever he likes; but whether absolute or limited, his right to disposal is not shared by anybody else, save under very exceptional circumstances, as in the case of “compulsion by necessity.”1 Property in a thing thus means not only that the owner of it is allowed, at least within certain limits, to use or deal with it at his discretion, but also that other persons are forbidden to prevent him from using or dealing with it in any manner he is entitled to.

The most common offence against property is illicit appropriation of other persons’ belongings. Not the mere fact that individuals are in actual possession of certain objects, but the public disapproval of acts by which they are deprived of such possession, shows that they have proprietary rights over those objects. Hence the universal condemnation of what we call theft or robbery proves that the right of property exists among all races of men known to us.

Travellers often accuse savages of thievishness.2 But then their judgments are commonly based upon the treatment to which they have been subject themselves, and from this no conclusions must be drawn as regards intra-tribal morality. Nor can races who have had much to do with foreigners be taken as fair representatives of savage honesty, as such contact has proved the origin of thievish propensities.3 In the majority of cases uncivilised peoples seem to respect proprietary rights within their own communities, and not infrequently even in their dealings with strangers. Many of them are expressly said to condemn or abhor theft, at any rate when committed among themselves. And that all of them disapprove of it may be inferred from the universal custom of subjecting a detected thief to punishment or revenge, or, at the very least, of compelling him to restore the stolen property to its owner.