Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/247

that the earth, in order to be susceptible of appropriation, must fall into hands which could perpetually preserve its ownership; and consequently, that the suppression of all rights of primogeniture and the expropriation of the property of the Church, and, added to this, the interdiction to the Church of the right of acquisition, is equivalent to the irrevocable condemnation of the right of property. Neither has this school ever comprehended that, rigorously and logically speaking, the earth cannot be the object of individual, but only of social appropriation, and that this last form of appropriation can only exist under the monastic form, or under the domestic form of primogeniture, which, considered In the light of perpetuity, are essentially the same thing, since both have an unending existence. The abolition of all civil and ecclesiastical mortmain, so vehemently insisted on by the liberals, will bring with it sooner or later, but at no distant day, a universal divestiture of property. Then the liberal school will learn what it now ignores, that no right of property can exist except what is found in mortmain, and it will then comprehend that the earth, which is of itself perpetual, cannot become the subject-matter of appropriation for the living, who pass away, but for the dead, who live always.

When the socialists, after denying that the family association is an implicit deduction from the axioms of the liberal school, and that the Church has a right to acquire property, a principle recognized by them and by the liberals; when, after denying this, they deny the right of property, they finish the work of the professedly candid doctors of liberalism; for communism, after having suppressed the right of individual ownership, proclaims the