Here, then, we have the full implication of the Georgean principle that private property in land is essentially unjust. It is not merely imperfect,--tolerable while unavoidable. When it can be supplanted by the right system, its inequalities must not continue under another form. If inequalities are continued through the compensation of private owners, individuals are still hindered from enjoying their equal rights to land, and the State becomes guilty of formal and culpable injustice. The titles which the State formerly guaranteed to the private owners did not have in morals the perpetual validity which they professed to have. Since the State is not the owner of the land, it was morally powerless to create or sanction titles of this character. Even if all the citizens at any given time had deliberately transferred the necessary authorisation to the State, "they could not," in the words of Henry George, "grant away the right of those who follow them." The individual's right to land is innate and natural, not civil or social. The author of "Progress and Poverty" attributes to the individual's _common_ right to land precisely the same absolute character that Father Liberatore predicates of the right to become a _private_ land owner.[24] In the view of Henry George, the State is merely the trustee of the land, having the duty of distributing its benefits and values so as to make effective the equal rights of all individuals. Consequently, the legal titles of private ownership which it creates or sanctions are valid only so long as nothing better is available. At best such titles have no greater moral force than the title by which an innocent purchaser holds a stolen watch; and the persons who are thereby deprived of their proper shares of land benefits, have the same right to recover them from the existing private owners that the watch-owner has to recover his property from the innocent purchaser. Hence the demand for compensation has no more merit in the one case than in the other. To the objection that the civil laws of many civilised countries would permit the innocent purchaser of the watch to retain it, provided that sufficient time had elapsed to create a title of prescription, the Single Taxer would reply that the two kinds of goods are not on the same moral basis in all respects. He would contend that the natural heritage of the race is too valuable, and too important for human welfare to fall under the title of prescription.