Improvement (property)

“ but it is nevertheless true, that it is the value of the improvement only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property. ”

“ Capital held by the tenure of mutual agreement,—that is, property in all things created subordinate to man, has a perpetual tendency to increase and improvement; and every such increase is an addition to the good of society. 22Cultivators of the land have made their portions more and more productive, so as to maintain a greater number of people perpetually. Inventions have arisen, arts have improved, manufactures have extended, till a far larger multitude of people spend their lives in ease and enjoyment, than would ever have been born if security of property had been unknown. ”

“ The scheme of improvement should include any surrounding property which will be benefited by the reconstruction of an unhealthy area, and the confirming order should authorise a rate to be levied on the owners of such adjacent property, fairly representing the appreciation of their holding by the proposed improvement. ”

“ If I have rightly grasped the object of your thought; if I succeed in bringing to light a truth which is indisputable, but, from causes which I am bold enough to claim to have explained, has always been misunderstood; if by an infallible method of investigation, I establish the dogma of equality of conditions; if I determine the principle of civil law, the essence of justice, and the form of society; if I annihilate property forever,—to you, gentlemen, will redound all the glory, for it is to your aid and your inspiration that I owe it. ”

“ For this value or wealth, produced by the activity of all, is by the very fact of its creation collective wealth, the use of which, like that of the land, may be divided, but which as property remains undivided. ”

“ In the further property development during succeeding centuries your ancestors continually improved, and increased their [Pg 86] property power so that now it is the dominant factor controlling the very life and destiny of every one of you. ”

“ With this power of creation, and this passion for independence, property has reached an ideal perfection. It is felt and treated as the national life-blood. The laws are framed to give property the securest possible basis, and the provisions to lock and transmit it have exercised the cunningest heads in a profession which never admits a fool. ”

“ If I approach, for instance, the works of one of our great Trusts, purchase it with public money, bestow, even as a gift, the shares thereof to its workmen, can I count upon any tradition of property in their midst which will prevent their squandering the new wealth? ”

“ The man who owns a house has the right to benefit by enjoying its shelter, by selling it, or by renting it. This right, the right to or in the benefits of wealth—or more briefly, the right to or in the wealth itself—is called a "property right" or simply "property." ”

“ Nor, indeed, even when property is the instrument used to provide for the future, is such provision dependent upon the maintenance in its entirety of the whole body of rights which accompany ownership to-day. ”

“ Each year, besides producing wealth in sufficient quantities to provide for himself and his family, he must devote a large portion of his energies to the provision of income for the owners of a vast and ever-growing body of immortalized property rights and interests. ”

“ I considered that property ought to be held sacred, and, besides, that the honestly obtaining of it was the great stimulant to industry, which kept all things in order, and society in full health and vigour. ”

“ Finally, in the last chapter, calling psychology to our aid, and probing man’s nature to the bottom, we shall disclose the principle of justice—its formula and character; we shall state with precision the organic law of society; we shall explain the origin of property, the causes of its establishment, its long life, and its approaching death ”

“ Well, sir, in writing against property, have I done more than quote the language of history? I have said to modern society,—the daughter and heiress of all preceding societies,—Age guod agis: complete the task which for six thousand years you have been executing under the inspiration and by the command of God; hasten to finish your journey; turn neither to the right nor the left, but follow the road which lies before you. You seek reason, law, unity, and discipline ”

“ Now, in the first place, here is a citizen who has got as much property as he wants, and who wishes to live for other purposes than to accumulate. This property is not only invested to his entire satisfaction, as regards convenience, security, and returns, but also in a way that is connected with some of the best sentiments of his nature. ”

“ This generation, by its labor, intelligence, and activity, creates products, develops values which did not exist on the uncultivated land. Is it not perfectly clear that the property of this industrious generation will stand on a basis of right, if the value or wealth produced by the activity of all be distributed among the producers, according to each one's assistance in the creation of the general wealth? ”

“ The Institution of Property, he might urge, is all well enough as a human expedient to secure its reward to industry, and protect the provident labourer against the careless and idle. But for half-million-per-annum fortunes, fifty-mile-long estates, and may-I-not-do-what-I-please-with-my-own proprietors, some other justification, it would seem, must be sought. ”

“ Property is the right to use and abuse. If, then, government is economy,—if its object is production and consumption, and the distribution of labor and products,—how is government possible while property exists? And if goods are property, why should not the proprietors be kings, and despotic kings—kings in proportion to their facultés bonitaires? And if each proprietor is sovereign lord within the sphere of his property, absolute king throughout his own domain, how could a government of proprietors be any thing but chaos and confusion? ”

“ The efforts of the propertied interests have been exerted to good purpose. The public mind, the laws and constitutions, the forms of judicial practice—in short, all of the social forces that were of advantage have been bent to the guarantee of property income permanence. ”

“ Sir, in the name of the institution of property, of that great institution, for the sake of which, chiefly, all other institutions exist, of that great institution to which we owe all knowledge, all commerce, all industry, all civilisation, all that makes us to differ from the tattooed savages of the Pacific Ocean, I protest against the pernicious practice of ascribing to that which is not property the sanctity which belongs to property alone. ”

“ It has a right, therefore, not only to be included in the grand inventory of a nation's resources, but to be placed at the very head of that inventory. It is not only the most honest and honorable, but the surest means of amassing property. ”

“ In the mean time, we may content ourselves with observing, that the same love of order and uniformity, which arranges the books in a library, and the chairs in a parlour, contribute to the formation of society, and to the well-being of mankind, by modifying the general rule concerning the stability of possession. And as property forms a relation betwixt a person and an object, 'tis natural to found it on some preceding relation; and as property is nothing but a constant possession, secur'd by the laws of society. ”

“ In other words, property consists in Values, in a purchasing-power, and not in possession, or in appropriation, or in the esteem in which a man holds anything he has as long as it is his own.
The test of property is a sale; that which will bring something when exposed for exchange is property; that which will bring nothing, either never was, or has now ceased to be, distinctively property. ”

“ For property which can be regarded as a condition of the performance of function, like the tools of the craftsman, or the holding of the peasant, or the personal possessions which contribute to a life of health and efficiency, forms an insignificant proportion, as far as its value is concerned, of the property rights existing at present. ”

“ That A is better fitted—naturally selected—to fill the holding, to use it happily and profitably for himself and for society, must count as nothing in face of the fact that B and C have taken the trouble to be born the owners of it. Then, too, comes in all the trouble and confusion about improvements, where property is split into this double ownership between the abstract state and the concrete holder. Improvements, we are told, can only realize their full value if there be a free sale and fixed rents. ”

“ It says that the ownership of property is the material foundation of human wellbeing, and that this natural right of ownership is sacred, after the manner in which individual life, and more especially national life, is sacred. ”

“ Those who are giving their time and energy to the production of wealth, face the fact that property rights have been so construed as to give property owners a first claim on production and to make property income a fixed charge on the industry of the community. ”

“ Far from being immovable, the conception of property has been modified in the course of centuries, and there is no doubt that it will be further modified in the future ... and it is certain that it is now going to evolve in the direction of greater complication, to richer complexity. ”

“ Our divergent views of existence are exemplified in the care we have taken to provide for an evener division of the products of industry. With us, property is the [Pg 274] means, and not the end, beyond which there are any number of attainments in life incomparably more desirable and beneficial to society, and our legislation has been directed chiefly to the care and cultivation of these. ”

“ You know, however, that every practicable step has been taken for that purpose, but without effect—your property should grow rapidly indeed, in order to keep pace with the increasing and incessant demands which are made upon it. ”

“ Now, all experience shows that the great property-incentives are to increase property, protect property, and to buy with property those advantages which ought to be independent of property, viz., honors, dignities, power, and immunities. I cannot say how it is with men, but our histories are eloquent on this head. We have had the property-principle carried out thoroughly in our practice, and the result has shown that its chief operation is to render property as intact as possible, and the bones, and sinews, and marrow of all who do not possess it, its slaves. ”

“ Once admit as the idea of property that nature should be progressively adapted to the service of man by a process in which each, while working freely or for himself, i.e. as determined by a conception of his own good, at the same time contributes to the social good, and it will follow that property must be unequal. ”

“ Now, a proprietor's right to have his property managed according to his own ideas needs no emphasizing. The sad thing is that such proprietors should get hold of such property. It all comes, of course, of the modern vulgarization of wealth. Time was when even mere wealth was aristocratic, and its possession, more or less implied in its possessors the possession, too, of refinement and culture. ”

“ The laws of property have never yet conformed to the principles on which the justification of private property rests. They have made property of things which never ought to be property, and absolute property where only a qualified property ought to exist. ”

“ Is not an owner deeply interested in the preservation of his property ? Some features of the property He may not like. He will try to reclaim it, but in a way which may not destroy it, and this is what Nature all around bears witness to. ”

“ The institution of property, when limited to its essential elements, consists in the recognition, in each person, of a right to the exclusive disposal of what he or she have produced by their own exertions, or received either by gift or by fair agreement, without force or fraud, from those who produced it. ”

“ Nothing that is of earth or on earth is beyond the dreams of one who owns enough private property. Therefore, the subject may be worth a little more than ordinary consideration.
What, then, is property? Let us look around us. One man has property in land. ”

“ I have already found out that, if you will join me, and add your small fortune to our combined exertions, we shall in a few years acquire a handsome independence, and the longer we apply ourselves to business, so much more valuable our property will become. ”

“ Some philosophers pretend that man, in employing his forces upon a natural object,—say a field or a tree,—acquires a right only to the improvements which he makes, to the form which he gives to the object, not to the object itself. Useless distinction! If the form could be separated from the object, perhaps there would be room for question; but as this is almost always impossible, the application of man's strength to the different parts of the visible world is the foundation of the right of property, the primary origin of riches. ”

“ In like manner, it should be allowed to a proprietor who leaves to one of his successors the moral burthen of keeping up an ancestral mansion and park or pleasure-ground, to bestow along with them as much other property as is required for their sufficient maintenance. ”

“ Thus the doctrine that the foundation of the right of property lies in the will, that property is 'realised will,' is true enough if we attach a certain meaning to 'will'; if we understand by it, not the momentary spring of any and every spontaneous action, but a constant principle, operative in all men qualified for any form of society, however frequently overborne by passing impulses, in virtue of which each seeks to give reality to the conception of a well-being which he necessarily regards as common to himself with others. ”

“ Even in that dark and turbulent age the inherent power of property was strikingly evinced in their case, by the protection which it long secured to them, notwithstanding all the hostility of the popular feeling, and the disregard of them by the law itself. ”