_The Right to Property_[54] “Property,” according to Blackstone, “is the sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.” Orthodox jurisprudence, like orthodox religion, is characterized by the absoluteness of its formula. It ignores the genesis of its concepts in the long line of antecedent historical development, and it disdains to entertain the demand for modification, though the circumstances of the time loudly call for it. “The sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises,” etc., may be a fact, but it is not a right. Property can only be regarded as a right if shown to be subservient to the ethical end,—the maintenance and development of personality. Orthodox jurisprudence effaces the end, and treats that which is or has been at one time a means as if it possessed a sanctity of its own. On the other hand, the empirical treatment of jurisprudence, in dismissing the supposedly absolute means, tends to leave out of sight the ethical end, and to treat the social institutions as subservient to mere convenience. The following propositions will indicate the changes in the conception of the right of property required by our ethical theory. 1. Property is a relation between a person or persons and things. There can be no property right in persons, but only in things.[55] 2. The right of property faces in two directions: Toward outside nature and toward fellow human beings. We have a right over the external things of nature. We have a right to the services, though not to the personality, of fellow human beings. These two aspects of the right of property must be kept apart and defined. It is sometimes held that the human race as a whole, as over against nature, has the right of dominion. Nature, it is said, is our quarry, we can take out of it the stones we need to construct the edifice of civilization. Nature is our tool. The laws of nature, as science discovers them, become our servants. Nature offers the raw material which we consume. Nature has no rights as against man. But I hold that neither has man rights as against nature, except in so far as he rightly defines the end in the interest of which he makes use of nature—the maintenance and development of personality.