most advantageous method of securing for the community the benefits of material riches.  While the owner of property has therefore an absolute right to the goods he possesses, he must at the same time remember that this right is established primarily on his power to benefit his neighbour by his proper use of it.  The best evidence of the correctness of this statement is the fact that the scholastics admitted that, if the owner of property was withholding it from the community, or from any member of the community who had a real need of it, he could be forced to apply it to its proper end.  If the community could pay for it, it was bound to do so; but if the necessitous person could not pay for it, he was none the less entitled to take it.  The former of these cases was illustrated by the principle of the dominium eminens of the State; and the latter by the principle that the giving of alms to a person in real need was a duty not of charity, but of justice.[5] We shall see in a moment that the most usual application of the principle enunciated by Aquinas was in the case of one person’s extreme necessity which required almsgiving from another’s superfluity, but, even short of such cases, there were rules of conduct in respect of the user of property on all occasions which were of extreme importance in the economic life of the time.

[Footnote 1:  Goyau insists on the importance of the words ‘procure’ and ‘dispense.’  ’Dont le premier eveille l’idee d’une constante sollicitude, et dont le second evoque l’image d’une generosite sympathetique’ (Autaur du Catholicisme Sociale, vol. ii. p. 93).]

[Footnote 2:  II. ii. 66, 2.  In another part of the Summa the same distinction is clearly laid down.  ’Bona temporalia quae* homini divinitus conferuntur, ejus quidem sunt quantum ad proprietatem; sed quantum ad usum non solum desent esse ejus, sed aliorum qui en eis sustentari possunt en eo quod ei superfluit,’ II. ii. 32, 6, ad 2.]

[Footnote 3:  Janssen, op. cit., vol. ii. p. 91.]

[Footnote 4:  The Abbe Calippe summarises St. Thomas’s doctrine as follows:  ’Le droit de propriete est un droit reel; mais ce n’est pas un droit illimite, les proprietaires ont des devoirs; ils ont des devoirs parce que Dieu qui a cree la terre ne l’a pas creee pour eux seuls, mais pour tous’ (Semaine Sociale de France, 1909, p. 123).  According to Antoninus of Florence, goods could be evilly acquired, evilly distributed, or evilly consumed (Irish Theological Quarterly, vol. vii. p. 146).]

[Footnote 5:  On the application of this principle by the popes in the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries in the case of their own estates, see Ardant, Papes et Paysans, a work which must be read with a certain degree of caution (Nitti, Catholic Socialism, p. 290).]