"Priority of occupation give exclusive and perpetual title to the surface of a globe in which, in the order of nature, countless generations succeed each other!... Has the first comer at a banquet the right to turn back all the chairs, and claim that none of the other guests shall partake of the food provided, except as they make terms with him? Does the first man who presents a ticket at the door of a theatre, and passes in, acquire by his priority the right to shut the doors and have the performance go on for him alone?... And to this manifest absurdity does the recognition of the individual right to land come when carried to its ultimate that any human being, could he concentrate in himself the individual rights to the land of any country, could expel therefrom all the rest of the inhabitants; and could he concentrate the individual rights to the whole surface of the globe, he alone of all the teeming population of the earth would have the right to live."[11] In passing, it may be observed that Henry George was not the first distinguished writer to use the illustration drawn from the theatre. Cicero, St. Basil, and St. Thomas Aquinas all employed it to refute extravagant conceptions of private ownership. In reply to the foregoing argument of Henry George, we point out: first, that the right of ownership created by first occupancy is not unlimited, either extensively or intensively; and, second, that the historical injustices connected with private ownership have been in only a comparatively slight degree due to the first occupation of very large tracts of land. The right of first occupancy does not involve the right to take a whole region or continent, compelling all subsequent arrivals to become tenants of the first. There seems to be no good reason to think that the first occupant is justified in claiming as his own more land than he can cultivate by his own labour, or with the assistance of those who prefer to be his employés or his tenants rather than independent proprietors. "He has not the right to reserve for himself alone the whole territory, but only that part of it which is really useful to him, which he can make fruitful."[12] Nor is the right of private landownership, on whatever title it may rest, unlimited intensively, that is, in its powers or comprehension. Though a man should have become the rightful owner of all the land in a neighbourhood, he would have no moral right to exclude therefrom those persons who could not without extreme inconvenience find a living elsewhere. He would be morally bound to let them cultivate it at a fair rental. The Christian conception of the intensive limitations of private ownership is well exemplified in the action of Pope Clement IV, who permitted strangers to occupy the third part of any estate which the proprietor refused to cultivate himself.[13] Ownership understood as the right to do what one pleases with one's possessions,