analysis as well as a synthesis. All the distinctions between organisms which have been pointed out, as well as others not indicated, are not to be done away with or ignored. Scientific procedure has tended to break up our concepts into smaller and more minute categories, has tended toward a more and more detailed analysis.

It appears, then, that if sociology and social psychology are to be limited to the so-called "conscious" or self-conscious behavior of human beings, their scope of study is incomplete and arbitrarily restricted. This type of activity is important and should be studied carefully, however. Further, if these disciplines limit their scope to human interaction alone, they rob themselves of comparative study. On the other hand, if social interaction and the study of it is extended to include the interstimulation or influences between organisms which respond to each other, then sociology and social psychology would study collective behavior, group activity, and the responses of organisms to collective behavior and social situations wherever found. Comparative sociology with comparative social psychology would thus present much valuable material. This field is now developed so little that it cannot be said to exist in any well-organized form.

TOLSTOY'S THEORY OF SOCIAL REFORM. II

MILIVOY S. STANOYEVICH
Columbia University

ABSTRACT

Tolstoy's teaching of property has many elements of chimerical schemes, sometimes confounded with medieval communism and Christian primitive utopias. The labor question is solved by the destruction of private ownership and by the distribution of land to the people who work manually. This doctrine, however, constitutes no valid ground for criticism of the historic right of private property in land. Most of his great expectations would not be realized. The problems of education, marriage, art, literature, sociology, and science in general are much deeper and more complex than he presumed. He approached them largely from the emotional and humanitarian standpoint. Tolstoy excels in the histrionics of reforms, and he achieves the most useful results when his exertions are fused by high moral purposes. His reformatory writings are in the last analysis vague, passionate, and erratic, yet ever sincere and uplifting. No doubt he failed in certain of his sociological theories, but he was operative in awakening the public conscience to the educational needs of the masses, and in erecting new ethical and moral standards for nineteenth-century society.

THE INTERPRETATION OF PROPERTY

I

When two Greek lawgivers, Lycurgus and Solon, imposed their laws upon the Greek nation they both had the same purpose-to establish the equal right of all men to the use of land and other properties. Plutarch, speaking of Lycurgus, observes that at that time "some were so poor that they had no inch of land, and others, of whom there were but few, so wealthy that they possessed all.” Lycurgus persuaded the citizens to restore the land to common use, and they did so. Solon had no other end in giving laws to the Athenians but to set up justice among all his fellow-citizens. He says that the ambition of the rich knows no bounds, that they respect neither sacred property nor public treasure, plundering all in defiance of the holy laws of justice. "I had commanded the wealthiest and most powerful to refrain from harming the weak." says he further, "I had protected great and humble with a double buckler, equally strong both sides, without giving more to one than to the

other. My advice has been disdained. Today they are punished for it."

Taken as a whole this doctrine of Lycurgus and Solon is not in accordance with Tolstoy's teaching on laws and property. But nevertheless it shows clearly that law and property are two indivisible civil institutions which cannot exist separately." Tolstoy is in opposition to both of them, especially against the commandment not to resist evil by force.

Under the term "property" here must be understood private or individual property. The notion of property, however, is not clear either in ancient or modern writers. In the course of human evolution property has many times changed its form and its substance, its meaning and its scope. In the societies that preceded ours, property embodied itself in a form of oppression which has been definitely abolished once for all. As is known, slavery was one of the forms of private property. In Greece and Rome there were public slaves, i.e., slaves of the city, and slaves of the state; but most of the slaves were simply a part of the patrimony of the citizens. Masters had the right to use them for cultivation of land, or to give them away as presents, or to sell them, or to leave them to their heirs. They had the legal right of imprisoning and fettering the slaves, or separating them from their wives, or forbidding them to marry. The slaves were part of the master's private ownership, and he disposed of them as he pleased. In the Roman laws, and also in the laws of Athens, we find that a father could sell his son. This was because the father might dispose of all the property of the family, and the son might be looked upon as property, since his labor 1 See these quotations on Solon and Lycurgus in Property, by Ch. Letourneau, chap. xiv, sec. v, 6.

1

"That property was created by law is proved by Montesquieu and Bentham. In The Spirit of Laws, Montesquieu argues that civil law is Palladium of property, and as the people acquired by political laws liberty, so they acquired by the civil law property. (The Spirit of Laws, Book XXVI, chap. xv). In the Principles of the Civil Code, by J. Bentham, we find the same idea expressed in these words: "Property is entirely the creature of law. . . . . Property and law are born and must die together. Before the laws, there was no property; take away the laws, all property ceases" (Principles of the Civil Code, Part I, chap. viii).

* Cf. Ch. Letourneau, Property, chaps. xiv and xv. See also Aristotle's Politics, Book I, chap. viii.

was a source of income. The best Greek and Roman philosophers saw nothing unlawful in that. Their conceptions of the respective rights and duties of masters and slaves would not clash in the least with the ideas even now in equatorial Africa, and some other European colonies elsewhere.

Between these old institutions of slavery and modern capitalistic systems Tolstoy was not able to find any great differences. To him the institution of slavery existed even in his time, only in other form than it was in Greece, India, and Rome. And the reason why this slavery existed lies in the institution of private property. If it be true, Tolstoy suggests, that property has its origin only in labor, why so many combats, revolutions, and wars? Why so many luxuries, robberies, and debaucheries? Are these vices not originated in personal or private property? Is it true that property and money represent labor? By no means, answers our philosopher. Property may be represented by money, and vice versa, but money has in our time completely lost that desirable significance as a representative of labor; such a significance it has only exceptionally, for as a general rule it has become a right or a possibility for exploiting the labor of others. Money is a new form of slavery, which differs from the old only in being impersonal and in freeing people from the human relations of the slave."

In an article, "To the Working People," written in 1902, three years before the Russian Revolution, Tolstoy attempted to open the eyes of the people, stating that they were deprived of the land which they formerly possessed and were forced to come to the cities as wage-workers or, practically, as slaves. The working people in manufacturing cities are in complete slavish dependence on their masters. These slaves may be liberated from the chains in which they are fettered in no way except by the abolition of private and capitalistic property, that is, giving the land to the people who work, and not to the people who live by the unearned increment. He adds that rural laborers have nothing to do with socialistic and communistic doctrinaires who propose the diminution of hours of

Cf. N. D. Fustel de Coulanges, Cité Antique, English, by W. Small (10th ed., 1901), Book II, chap. viii, p. 120.

'What Shall We Do Then (Wiener's ed., Vol. XVII, 1904), chap. xxi, p. 163.

work and raising of wages by strikes, unions, and childish processions with flags on the first of May. They need not send into parliaments the representatives who fight there "about words, with words, and for words," as Lasalle once reproached the "bourgeois" representatives. The workingmen who leave the land and live by factory labor must find some other means to rid themselves of the slavery. They should ask and demand of their masters and rulers the right to settle on the land, and to work there. In demanding this they will not be demanding something not their own, not belonging to them, but the restitution of their most unquestionable and inalienable right, which is inherent in every living being, to live on the land and get their sustenance from it, without asking permission from anyone else to do so. To be sure, masters and rulers will not give the people the land which they demand. Governments are in power to prevent this claim. But governments have no power without the police and army, and who are the constituents of this army and police? People-workingmen. When these laborers refuse to serve the un-Christian and brutal commands of the governments, then the people can divide and take as much land as they need for cultivation and their living.

Should it not be robbery to take the possessions of people who accumulated them for hundreds and thousands of years? Yes, but how did these upper classes accumulate their property and riches? Tolstoy replies on this question, together with his teacher Proudhon: "They heaped up their properties by theft from other people." La propriété c'est le vol, said Proudhon." Sobstvennost v nashe vremya est koren vsego zla ("Property in our time is the root of all evil"), continues his disciple, by the same axiomatic language outdistancing the master."

Is this statement categorical? From the standpoint of Proudhon and Tolstoy it is, but from the point of view of economists this doctrine is at fault. The Russian iconoclast, Tolstoy, like the

"Cf. Qu'est ce que la Propriété (1840), English translation by B. Tucker (1876), First Memoir, chap. i.

'Tak Chto Zhe Nam Delat? Sochineniya Grafa L. N. Tolstoga (I. N. Kushnerev's ed., 1911), Vol. XVII, chap. xxxix, p. 289.