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The Development of Modern Ideas 355 And also the idea that " a man may do what he Ukes with his own " was very much shaken in relation to other sorts of property. But this world of the closing eighteenth century was still only in the interrogative stage in this matter. It had got nothing clear enough, much less settled enough, to act upon. One of its primary impulses was to protect property against the greed and waste of kings and the exploitation of noble adventurers. It was largely to protect private property from taxation that the French Revolution began. But the equalitarian formulae of the Revolution carried it into a criticism of the very property it had risen to protect. How can men be free and equal when numbers of them have no ground to stand upon and nothing to eat, and the owners will neither feed nor lodge them unless they toil ? Excessively — ^the poor complained. To which riddle the reply of one important political group was to set about " dividing up." They wanted to intensify and univer- salize property. Aiming at the same end by another route, there were the primitive socialists — or, to be more exact, communists — ^who wanted to " abolish " private property altogether. The state (a democratic state was of course understood) was to own all property. It is paradoxical that different men seeking the same ends of liberty and happiness should propose on the one hand to make property as absolute as possible, and on the other to put an end to it altogether. But so it was. And the clue to this paradox is to be found in the fact that ownership is not one thing but a multitude oi different things. It was only as the nineteenth century developed that men began to realize that property was not one simple thing, but a great complex of ownerships of different values and consequences, that many things (such as one's body, the implements of an artist, clothing, tooth- brushes) are very profoundly and incurably one's personal property, and that there is a very great range of things, railways, machinery of various sorts, homes, cultivated gardens, pleasure boats, for example, which need each to be considered very particularly to determine how far and under what limitations it may come under private owner- ship, and how far it falls into the public domain amd may be adminis- tered and let out by the state in the collective interest. On the prac- tical side these questions pass into politics, and the problem of making and sustaining efficient state administration. They open up issues in social psychology, and interact with the enquiries of educa- tional science. The criticism of property is still a vast and passionate