The Unpopular Review | Page 2

property owners--insists with equal vehemence upon
absolving the propertyless evil-doer from personal responsibility for his
acts. The Los Angeles dynamiters were but victims: the crime in which
they were implicated was institutional, not personal. Their punishment
was rank injustice; inexpedient, moreover, as provocative of further
crime, instead of a means of repression. On the other hand, when it
appears that the congestion of the slum produces vice and disease, we
are not urged by the spokesmen of this ethical creed, to blame the chain
of institutional causes typified by scarcity of land, high prices of
building materials, the incapacity of a raw immigrant population to pay
for better habitations, or to appreciate the need for light and air. Rather,
we are urged to fix responsibility upon the individual owner who
receives rent from slum tenements. Perhaps we can not imprison him
for his misdeeds, but we can make him an object of public reproach;

expel him from social intercourse (if that, so often talked about, is ever
done); fasten his iniquities upon him if ever he seeks a post of trust or
honor; and ultimately we can deprive him of his property. Let him and
his anti-social interests be forever excommunicate, outlawed.
II
In the country at large the property interests involved in the production
and sale of alcoholic beverages are already excommunicated. The
unreformed "best society" may still tolerate the presence of persons
whose fortunes are derived from breweries or distilleries; but the great
mass of the social-minded would deny them fire and water. In how
many districts would a well organized political machine urge persons
thus enriched as candidates for Congress, the bench or even the school
board? In the prohibition territory excommunication of such property
interests has been followed by outlawry. The saloon in Maine and
Kansas exists by the same title as did Robin Hood: the inefficiency of
the law. On the road to excommunication is private property in the
wretched shacks that shelter the city's poor. Outlawry is not far distant.
"These tenements must go." Will they go? Ask of the police, who pick
over the wreckage upon the subsidence of a wave of reform. Many a
rookery, officially abolished, will be found still tenanted, and yielding
not one income, but two, one for the owner and another for the police.
The property represented by enterprises paying low wages, working
men for long hours or under unhealthful conditions, or employing
children, is almost ripe for excommunication. Pillars of society and the
church have already been seen tottering on account of revelations of
working conditions in factories from which they receive dividends.
Property "affected by a public use," that is, investments in the
instrumentalities of public service, is becoming a compromising
possession. We are already somewhat suspicious of the personal
integrity and political honor of those who receive their incomes from
railways or electric lighting plants; and the odor of gas stocks is
unmistakable. Even the land, once the retreat of high birth and serene
dignity, is beginning to exhale a miasma of corruption. "Enriched by
unearned increment"--who wishes such an epitaph? A convention is to
be held in a western city in this very year, to announce to the world that
the delegates and their constituencies--all honest lovers of
mankind--will refuse in future to recognize any private title to land or

other natural resources. Holders of such property, by continuing to be
such, will place themselves beyond the pale of human society, and will
forfeit all claim to sympathy when the day dawns for the universal
confiscation of land.
III
The existence of categories of property interests resting under a
growing weight of social disapprobation, is giving rise to a series of
problems in private ethics that seem almost to demand a rehabilitation
of the art of casuistry. A very intelligent and conscientious lady of the
writer's acquaintance became possessed, by inheritance, of a one-fourth
interest in a Minneapolis building the ground floor of which is
occupied by a saloon. Her first endeavor was to persuade her partners
to secure a cancellation of the liquor dealer's lease. This they refused to
do, on the ground that the building in question is, by location,
eminently suited to its present use, but very ill suited to any other; and
that, moreover, the lessee would immediately reopen his business on
the opposite corner. To yield to their partner's desire would therefore
result in a reduction of their own profits, but would advance the public
welfare not one whit. Disheartened by her partners' obstinacy, my
friend is seeking to dispose of her interest in the building. As she is
willing to incur a heavy sacrifice in order to get rid of her complicity in
what she considers an unholy business, the transfer will doubtless soon
be made. Her soul will be