We know nowadays that the nineteenth century expended a great wealth of intelligence upon a barren controversy between Individualism and Socialism. They were treated as mutually exclusive alternatives instead of being questions of degree. Human society has been, is and always must be, an intricate system of adjustments between unconditional liberty and the disciplines and subordinations of co-operative enterprise. Affairs do not move simply from a more individualist to a more socialist state or vice versa; there may be a release of individual initiative going on here and standardisation or restraint increasing there. Personal property never can be socially guaranteed and yet unlimited in action and extent as the extremer individualists desired, nor can it be “abolished” as the extremer socialists proposed. Property is not robbery, as Proudhon asserted; it is the protection of things against promiscuous and mainly wasteful use. In some cases it may restrict or forbid a use of things that would be generally advantageous, and it may be and is frequently unfair in its assignment of initiative, but the remedy for that is not an abolition but a revision of property. In the concrete it is a form necessary for liberty of action upon material, while abstracted as money, that liquidated generalised form of property, it is a ticket for individual liberty of movement and individual choice of reward. The economic history of mankind is a history of the operation of the idea of property; it relates the conflict of the unlimited acquisitiveness of egoistic individuals against the resentment of the disinherited and unsuccessful and the far less effective consciousness of a general welfare. Money grew out of a system of abstracting conventions and has been subjected to a great variety of restrictions, monopolisations and regulations. It has never been an altogether logical device and it has permitted the most extensive and complex developments of credit, debt and dispossession. All these developments have brought with them characteristic forms of misuse and corruption. The story is intricate and the tangle of relationships of dependence, of pressure, of interception, of misdirected services, crippling embarrassments and crushing obligations in which we live to-day admits of no such simple and general solutions as many exponents of socialism, for example, seem to consider possible. But the thought and investigations of the past century or so have made it clear that a classification of property according to the nature of the rights exercisable and according to the range of ownership involved must be the basis of any system of social justice in the future.