and taxation for the common benefit--which latter was not finally
established until two hundred years later (that is, it was put in the
first Magna Charta, John's, and then quietly dropped out by Henry II,
and kept out of the charter for nearly one hundred years),--we have to
come down to the year 1100 before we find the first _sociological_
statute. "Henry I called another convention of all the estates of the
realm to sit in his royal palace at London ... the prohibiting the
priests the use of their wives and concubines was considered, and the
bishops and clergy granted to the king the correction of them for that
offence; by which means he raised vast sums of money compounding with
the priests...."[1]

[Footnote 1: Cobbett's "Parliamentary History of England," I, 4.]

In 1 Henry, cap. VII, is another recognition of personal property--it
says that at a man's death it is to be divided between his widow and
his heirs. Now that may seem commonplace enough; but it is interesting
to note, as in the law, personal property did not come first; property
in land was many centuries earlier. And this suggests the legal basis
and present tendency of the law of property. "Property exists only
by the law"; and extreme socialists say that all private property is
robbery. No law, no property; this is true. Property is an artificial
thing. It is a creation of law. In other words, where there is now no
law except statute, it is the creation of statute. That may sound a
commonplace, but is not, when you remember that socialists, who are
attacking property, do so on precisely that ground. They say it is a
fictitious thing, it is a matter of expediency, it is a matter which
we can recognize or not, as we like; "no law, no property," and they
ask us to consider whether, on the whole, it is a good thing to have
any property at all, or whether the state had not better own all the