they are not so until dominated over and subjugated by man; and then only do they acquire value and become negotiable and subject to proprietorship. Gravity and electricity, as free forces, are incapable of sale and taxation; nor can they, in any rational view, be considered as property. According to recent decisions of the courts of the United States, electricity is not a manufactured product, and electric-light plants do not manufacture it, but only distribute it.
What are Titles to Property?—But while political economy recognizes nothing as property except physical actualities, the law, for the sake of convenience, has so long treated titles as conveying the same ideas as property, that the profession and the public have very generally come to regard the two as equivalent or identical. Consideration is, therefore, next asked to this point.
Property being embodied and accumulated labor, it becomes endowed, in all places where the rights of labor are recognized, with the attributes and incidents of titles or evidence of just ownership or possession—inchoate, legal, or equitable—which inhere in the property, follow it, and form a component part of it wherever found. The fact that the ownership, interest, or title of a non-resident, as, for example, a bond and mortgage title to his debtor's property in another state or country, can be extinguished in the real and personal property of the debtor, by attachment or other process of law in the state where the debtor resides, and where his visible, tangible property has a situs, also leads up to and establishes as a principle of law that titles or incumbrances are connected with the owner, but inhere in the property, where the property is actually situated, as incidents, form a part and are inseparable from it, and include the equitable title or right of the creditor in the debtor's unsold and unincumbered property, but are not themselves property. Some economists befog themselves on this subject, as before shown, by first defining property as anything that can be bought and sold, and then, since a title—as, for example, a deed—can be bought and sold, accept the inference that a title is necessarily property. But let us analyze this definition and assumption. The creditor can, without doubt, sell and deliver a deed to a farm, but what is sold in such instances is the farm, including a right—namely, a right to have dominion over it. But it may be rejoined that a right of dominion is property. Let us, therefore, carry the analysis a little further. If a farm in California is property in the State where it is and where it is taxed, any right or title to the same farm, held in New York or England, be it in the nature of a deed, a mortgage, a partnership interest, or any other form of title, can not be the property; for the same thing certainly can not be property in two separate States and jurisdictions, and in two distinct forms and manifestations, at the
