Sec. 5. #Origin vs. justification#.  The question of the origin is not the same as that of the present justification of the existing system of private property.  The institution of private property has evolved under diverse conditions.  In early societies individual property rights were not very clearly marked.  Every tribe asserted against other tribes, and tried to uphold by war, its claims upon its customary hunting grounds; but the claims of the individual hunters on land within the tribe did not often come into conflict.  Private property at the outset was in personal possessions, ornaments, weapons, utensils, which were very meager in that primitive society in which it was the custom “to go calling with a club instead of a card-case.”  Only later came individual property in land.  A few years ago it was generally believed that the organization of the old German tribes was politically an almost perfect democracy, and economically a communism in which all had equal claims upon the land.  To-day this opinion is very seriously questioned.  It seems probable that there was a goodly measure of communism in the control and use of lands (tho not in other things), but this was largely confined to an oligarchy of the favored; whereas the masses lived in subjection, cut off from all but a meager share in the common lands.  However that may have been, strong forces within historic times have put an end to the common ownership and tillage of land as it existed among the peasants of Europe.  That system was shown by experience to be wasteful.  Competition tended to bring the economic agents into more efficient hands, and the movement was furthered by many acts of injustice and violence on the part of those in power.

Inquiries into the origin and development of any social institution are interesting and helpful in forming an estimate of its present significance, but the problems of the past are not those of to-day.  Whether or not the ancient beginning of property in Europe was in violence and evil has but a remote bearing on the question as to the present working of it.  Social conditions and needs have not changed more than have the forms and limits of property itself.  Each generation has its own problems to solve, and ignoring for the most part the evils of the distant past, each generation must test existing institutions by their present results.

Sec. 6. #Limitations of private property#.  It is well, in discussing private property, to rid the mind at once of the idea that it is an absolute and unchanging thing.  Few realize the manifold ways in which property rights are limited.  Unmodified private control of property is unknown; the public makes many reservations in its own interest.  There is, first, a whole set of limitations to prevent nuisances.  An owner in many situations is not free to build a slaughter-house or to start a glue-factory on his land.  Property is governed by general public utility, and anything that threatens to become a nuisance or a danger may be excluded.  Under the right of “eminent domain,” the state or the railroad takes the old homestead from the owner who would live and die there.