As human labor can attain its full development, only on the supposition that personal freedom is allowed to develop to its full economic importance and dimensions, so capital can develop its full productive power only on the supposition of the existence of the freedom of personal property. Who would save anything, that is, give up present enjoyment, if he were not certain of future enjoyment?(468) The legitimacy of private property has, since the time of Locke,(469) been based, by the greater number of political economists, on the right inherent in every workman, either to consume or to save the product of his labor. But it should not be forgotten here that, at least in the higher stages of the economy of a nation, scarcely any work or saving is possible without the coöperation of society. And society must be conceived not only as the sum-total of the now living individuals that compose it, but in its entire past, present and future, and also as being led and borne onward by eternal ideas and wants.(470) Section LXXVIII. Socialism And Communism. In opposition to this, the idea of a community of goods has found favor, especially in times when the four following conditions met:(471) A. _A well-defined, confrontation of rich and-poor._ So long as there is a middle class of considerable numbers between them, the two extremes are kept, by its moral force, from coming into collision. There is no greater preservative against envy of the superior classes and contempt for the inferior, than the gradual and unbroken fading of one class of society into another. _Sperate miseri, cavete felices!_ In such a state of social organization, we find the utmost and freshest productive activity at every round of the great ladder. Those at the bottom are straining every nerve to rise, and those higher up, not to fall below. But where the rich and the poor are separated by an abyss which there is no hope of ever crossing, how pride on the one side and envy on the other rage! and especially in the _foci_ of industry, the great cities, where the deepest misery is found side by side with the most brazen-faced luxury, and where the wretched themselves conscious of their numbers, mutually excite their own bad passions. It cannot, unfortunately, be denied, that when a nation has attained the acme of its development, we find a multitude of tendencies prevailing to make the rich richer and the poor, at least relatively poorer, and thus to diminish the numbers of the middle class from both sides; unless, indeed, remedial influences are brought to bear and to operate in a contrary direction.(472)