thereof as one great habitation or domain, then each generation, subject to certain modifications for the encouragement of industry and frugality, which modifications it is not necessary here to specify, has only a life-lease in them. There are certain reasonable regulations, indeed, in regard to the outgoing and the incoming tenants,-regulations which allow to the outgoing generations a brief control over their property after they are called upon to leave it, and which also allow the incoming generations to anticipate a little their full right of possession. But, subject to these regulations, nature ordains a perpetual entail and transfer from one generation to another of all property in the great, substantive, enduring elements of wealth,in the soil, in metals and minerals, in precious stones, and in more precious coal and iron and granite, in the waters and winds and sun; and no one man, nor any one generation of men, has any such title to or ownership in these ingredients and substantials of all wealth that his right is evaded when a portion of them is taken for the benefit of posterity.

This great principle of natural law may be illustrated by a reference to some of the unstable elements, in regard to which each individual's right of property is strongly qualified in relation to his contemporaries, even while he has the acknowledged right of possession. Take the streams of water or the wind, for an example. A stream, as it descends from its sources to its mouth, is successively the property of all those through whose land it passes. My neighbor who lives above me owned it yesterday, while it was passing through his lands: I own it to-day, while it is descending through mine; and the contiguous proprietor below will own it to-morrow, while it is flowing through his, as it passes onward to the next. But the rights of these successive owners are not absolute and unqualified. They are limited by the rights of those who are entitled to the subsequent possession and use. While a stream is passing through my lands, I may not corrupt it, so that it shall be offensive or valueless to the adjoining proprietor below. I may not stop it in its downward course, nor divert it into any other direction, so that it shall leave this channel dry. I may lawfully use it for various purposes for agriculture, as in irrigating lands or watering cattle; for manufactures, as in turning wheels, etc.; - but, in all my uses of it, I must pay regard to the rights of my neighbors lower down. So no two proprietors, nor any half-dozen proprietors, by conspiring together, can de

prive an owner, who lives below them all, of the ultimate right which he has to the use of the stream in its descending course. We see here, therefore, that a man has certain qualified rights — rights of which he cannot lawfully be divested without his own consent-in a stream of water before it reaches the limits of his own estate, at which latter point he may somewhat more emphatically call it his own. And, in this sense, a man who lives at the outlet of a river, on the margin of the ocean, has certain incipient rights in those fountain-sources that well up from the earth at the distance of thousands of miles....

In one respect, the winds illustrate our relative rights and duties even better than the streams. In the latter case the rights are not only successive, but always in the same order of priority, those of the owner above necessarily preceding those of the owner below.... In the case of the winds, however, which blow from every quarter of the heavens, I may have the prior right to-day; but, with a change in their direction, my neighbor may have it to-morrow. If, therefore, to-day, when the wind is going from me to him, I should usurp the right to use it to his detriment, to-morrow, when it is coming from him to me, he may inflict retributive usurpation upon me.

The light of the sun, too, is subject to the same benign and equitable regulations. As the waves of this ethereal element pass by me, I have a right to bask in their genial warmth or to employ their quickening powers; but I have no right, even on my own land, to build up a wall mountain-high that shall eclipse the sun to my neighbor's eyes.

Now all these great principles of natural law which define and limit the rights of neighbors and contemporaries are incorporated into and constitute a part of the civil law of every civilized people; and they are obvious and simple illustrations of the great proprietary laws by which individuals and generations hold their rights in the solid substance of the globe, in the elements that move over its surface, and in the chemical and vital powers with which it is so marvellously endued. As successive owners on a river's bank have equal rights to the waters that flow through their respective domains, subject only to the modification that the proprietors nearer the stream's source must have precedence in the enjoyment of their rights over those lower down, so the rights of all the generations of mankind to the earth itself, to the streams that fertilize it, to the winds that purify it, to the vital principles that animate it,

and to the reviving light, are common rights, though subject to similar modifications in regard to the preceding and succeeding generations of men....

Is not the inference irresistible, then, that no man, by whatever means he may have come into possession of his property, has any natural right, any more than he has a moral one, to hold it, or to dispose of it, irrespective of the needs and claims of those who, in the august processions of the generations, are to be his successors on the stage of existence? Holding his rights subject to their rights, he is bound not to impair the value of their inheritance either by commission or by omission. Generation after generation proceeds from the creative energy of God. Each one stops for a brief period upon the earth, resting, as it were, only for a night, like migratory birds upon their passage, and then leaving it forever to others whose existence is as transitory as its own; and the migratory flocks of water-fowl which sweep across our latitudes in their passage to another clime have as good a right to make a perpetual appropriation to their own use of the lands over which they fly as any one generation has to arrogate perpetual dominion and sovereignty, for its own purposes, over that portion of the earth which it is its fortune to occupy during the brief period of its temporal existence.

Another consideration bearing upon this arrogant doctrine of absolute ownership or sovereignty has hardly less force than the one just expounded. We have seen how insignificant a portion of any man's possessions he can claim in any proper and just sense to have earned, and that, in regard to all the residue, he is only taking his turn in the use of a bounty bestowed in common, by the Giver of all, upon his ancestors, upon himself, and upon his posterity, a line of indefinite length, in which he is but a point. But this is not the only deduction to be made from his assumed rights. The present wealth of the world has an additional element in it. Much of all that is capable of being earned by man has been earned by our predecessors, and has come down to us in a solid and enduring form. We have not erected all the houses in which we live, nor constructed all the roads on which we travel, nor built all the ships in which we carry on our commerce with the world. We have not reclaimed from the wilderness all the fields whose harvests we now reap; and, if we had no precious metals or stones or pearls but such as we ourselves

had dug from the mines or brought up from the bottom of the ocean, our coffers and our caskets would be empty indeed. But, even if this were not so, whence came all the arts and sciences, the discoveries and the inventions, without which, and without a common right to which, the valuation of the property of a whole nation would scarcely equal the inventory of a single man,- without which, indeed, we should now be in a state of barbarism? Whence came a knowledge of agriculture, without which we should have so little to reap? or a knowledge of astronomy, without which we could not traverse the oceans? or a knowledge of chemistry and mechanical philosophy, without which the arts and trades could not exist? Most of all this was found out by those who have gone before us; and some of it has come down to us from a remote antiquity. Surely, all these boons and blessings belong as much to posterity as to ourselves. They have not descended to us to be arrested and consumed here or to be sequestrated from the ages to come. Cato and Archimedes, and Kepler and Newtop, and Franklin and Arkwright and Fulton, and all the bright host of benefactors to science and art, did not make or bequeath their discoveries or inventions to benefit any one generation, but to increase the common enjoyments of mankind to the end of time. So of all the great lawgivers and moralists who have improved the civil institutions of the state, who have made it dangerous to be wicked, or, far better than this, have made it hateful to be so. Resources developed and property acquired after all these ages of preparation, after all these facilities and securities, accrue, not to the benefit of the possessor only, but to that of the next and of all succeeding generations.

Surely, these considerations limit still more extensively that absoluteness of ownership which is so often claimed by the possessors of wealth.

"My

But sometimes the rich farmer, the opulent manufacturer, or the capitalist, when sorely pressed with his natural and moral obligation to contribute a portion of his means for the education of the young, replies,- either in form or in spirit, lands, my machinery, my gold, and my silver are mine: may I not do what I will with my own?" There is one supposable case, and only one, where this argument would have plausibility. If it were made by an isolated, solitary being,— a being having no relations to a community around him, having no ancestors to whom he had been indebted for ninety-nine

Let

But

parts in every hundred of all he possesses, and expecting to leave no posterity after him,- it might not be easy to answer it. If there were but one family in this Western hemisphere and only one in the Eastern hemisphere, and these two families bore no civil and social relations to each other, and were to be the first and last of the whole race, it might be difficult, except on very high and almost transcendental grounds, for either one of them to show good cause why the other should contribute to help educate children not his own. And perhaps the force of the appeal for such an object would be still further diminished if the nearest neighbor of a single family upon our planet were as far from the earth as Uranus or Sirius. In self-defence or in selfishness one might say to the other: "What are your fortunes to me? You can neither benefit nor molest me. each of us keep to his own side of the planetary spaces." is this the relation which any man amongst us sustains to his fellows? In the midst of a populous community to which he is bound by innumerable ties, having had his own fortune and condition almost predetermined and foreordained by his predecessors, and being about to exert upon his successors as commanding an influence as has been exerted upon himself, the objector can no longer shrink into his individuality, and disclaim connection and relationship with the world at large. He cannot deny that there are thousands around him on whom he acts, and who are continually reacting upon him. The earth is much too small or the race is far too numerous to allow us to be hermits, and therefore we cannot adopt either the philosophy or the morals of hermits. All have derived benefits from their ancestors; and all are bound, as by an oath, to transmit those benefits, even in an improved condition, to posterity. We may as well attempt to escape from our own personal identity as to shake off the threefold relation which we bear to others,- the relation of an associate with our contemporaries, of a beneficiary of our ancestors, of a guardian to those who, in the sublime order of Providence, are to succeed us. Out of these relations, manifest duties are evolved. The society of which we necessarily constitute a part must be preserved; and, in order to preserve it, we must not look merely to what one individual or one family needs, but to what the whole community needs, not merely to what one generation needs, but to the wants of a succession of generations. To draw conclusions without considering these facts is to leave out the most important part of the premises.