207. (4) (See sec. 156). The right of free life is coming to be more and more recognised amongst us _negatively_; is it reasonable to do so little _positively_ to make its exercise possible? 208. First observe that the capacity for free life is a moral capacity, i.e. a capacity for being influenced by a sense of common interest 209. This influence will only be weakened by substituting for it that of law, but the state can do more than it usually does without deadening spontaneous action; e.g. 'compulsory education' need not be 'compulsory' except to those who have no spontaneity to be deadened 210. So too with interference with 'freedom of contract'; we must consider not only those who are interfered with, but those whose freedom is increased by the interference. N. _The right of the state in regard to property._ 211. As to property two questions have to be kept distinct, _(a)_ how there has come to be property, _(b)_ how there has come to be a _right_ of property. Each of those again may be treated either historically or metaphysically 212. The confusion of those questions and methods has given rise either to truisms or to irrelevant researches as to the nature of property 213. Property implies _(a)_ appropriation, i.e. an act of will, of a permanent self demanding satisfaction and expression 214. _(b)_ Recognition of the appropriation by others. This recognition cannot be derived from contract (Grotius), or from a supreme force (Hobbes) 215. Locke rightly bases the right of property on the same ground as the right to one's own person; but he does not ask what that ground is 216. The ground is the same as that of the right of life, of which property is the instrument, viz. the consciousness of a common interest to which each man recognises every other man as contributing 217. Thus the act of appropriation and the recognition of it constitute one act of _will_, as that in which man seeks a good at once common and personal 218. The condition of the family or clan, in which e.g. land is held in common, is not the negation, but on the contrary the earliest expression of the right of property 219. Its defect lies _(a)_ in the limited scope for free moral development which it allows the associates, _(b)_ in the limited range of moral relations into which it brings them 220. But the expansion of the clan into the state has not brought with it a corresponding emancipation of the individual. Is then the existence of a practically propertyless class in modern states a necessity, or an abuse? 221. In theory, everyone who is capable of living for a common good (whether he actually does so or not) ought to have the means for so doing: these means are property 222. But does not this theory of property imply freedom of appropriation and disposition, and yet is it not just this freedom which leads to the existence of a propertyless proletariate?