Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/268

ity of this theory. In fact Communism, as all socialistic schools comprehend and preach it, is the outgrowth of a preposterous chimera, evolved from the inflamed imagination of certain dreamers, deaf and blind to the realities of the world and human nature. Actual community in property or the negation of individual rights in property, has never existed since the world began. That condition of property holding which a superficial observer might consider to be Communism, and of which several examples have occurred in historic times, some even existing in a few isolated places at the present day, is founded upon the basis of individual ownership of property, separate from the mass of property existing in the world at large. When such a perfect cohesion and sense of fellowship exists among a small number of individuals owing to their common descent or to other causes, that a family, a village or a whole tribe, considers itself as one single being of a higher order of creation, then it is conceivable that this collective individual should possess an indivisible collective amount of property, which the single individual could not control and use for his own advantage and to the prejudice of others. This kind of collective property holding, which exists in several places in Europe at the present time, such as the Russian Mir and the united households of the Croatians and Slavonians, has nothing in common with Communism, that is, fundamental and universal community in property throughout the world, as can easily be demonstrated. Just let an outsider, an individual not accepted as a member of the circle of joint owners of the common property, let him attempt to get possession of the smallest fragment of it! The entire tribe, village, Mir, etc, will rise up in arms at once to repel the intruder. The joint possessors of the common capital are imbued so strongly with the sense of proprie-