Now, all statutes are limitations on a state of pure individualism, defining this latter word to mean a state of society recognizing personal liberty and private property, and allowing all possible freedom of action and contract relating thereto; with a court administration for the purpose of protecting such liberty and enforcing such contracts in the courts.  The usual rough division of our constitutional rights, following the phraseology of the Fourteenth Amendment, is that of life, liberty, and property; but the rights to life and liberty obviously belong to the same broad field.  Our first division, therefore, may well be that which divides life and liberty rights from property rights; although in some cases, notably in the earnings of labor, they would be found to run together.  Liberty rights are multifarious and indefinite; we may, therefore, first take the field of property as presenting, after all, a more simple subject.  Considering all possible organizations of human society from this point of view, we shall find that all may be expressed, all at least that have hitherto been conceived, under the systems of anarchism, individualism, and socialism, these words expressing all possible states of human society when expressed in terms of individual liberty, that is to say, the free exercise of the individual will.  Either one of these may exist either with or without the notion of private property; though, of course, one’s action as to property would be controlled under a system of socialism, and property itself would have no legal protection under a system of anarchism.  Nevertheless, the notion of property might still exist and be recognized by the custom of mankind without any sanction or enforcement from the entire community, i.e., what people call the state.  When we are speaking in terms of property, we use the word communism—­meaning that state of society where the conception of property exists, but the law or custom will not recognize individualism.  Communism, therefore, usually implies ownership by the entire community, while in anarchism there is no property at all.  There has been much confusion in the use of these terms in the popular mind, and even in ordinary writing.  Many people have confounded, for instance, socialism with anarchism or nihilism, when the two things are whole poles apart.  In the same manner, communism has been confounded with socialism, although the term should be used in entirely different connections—­communism when we are speaking in terms of property, socialism when we are speaking in terms of individual liberty.  The word individualism was used by the present writer in a series of articles entitled “The Ethics of Democracy,” beginning in 1887, as the most convenient term for describing that state of society where the greatest possible individual liberty is conjoined with a strong recognition of the right of private property, substantially the laissez faire school as it existed in England in the first half of the last century; “the distinction between communistic and socialistic laws being, that the former are concerned solely with the taking or redistribution of money or property; the latter regulate or prohibit men’s mode of life, acts, or contracts, either among themselves or as concerning the state.” [1]