ciled, doctrines which foreshadow those of developed capitalism and doctrines which adumbrate a
more nearly socialistic outlook. It is easy to misrepresent him by one-sided quotations, on this
topic as on most others.
I will put down, in the order in which they occur, Locke's principal dicta on the subject of
property.
We are told first that every man has private property in the produce of his own labour--or, at least,
should have. In pre-industrial days this maxim was not so unrealistic as it has since become.
Urban production was mainly by handicraftsmen who owned their tools and sold their produce.
As for agricultural production, it was held by the school to which Locke belonged that peasant
proprietorship would be the best system. He states that a man may own as much land as he can
till, but not more. He seems blandly unaware that, in all the countries of Europe, the realization of
this programme would be hardly possible without a bloody revolution. Everywhere the bulk of
agricultural land belonged to aristocrats, who exacted from the farmers either a fixed proportion of
the produce (often a half), or a rent which could be varied from time to time. The former system
prevailed in France and Italy, the latter in England. Farther East, in Russia and Prussia, the
workers were serfs, who worked for the landowner and had virtually no rights. The old system
was ended in France by the French Revolution, in northern Italy and western Germany by the
conquests of the French revolutionary armies. Serfdom was abolished in Prussia as a result of
defeat by Napoleon, and in Russia as a result of defeat in the Crimean War. But in both countries
the aristocrats retained their landed estates. In East Prussia, this system, though drastically
controlled by the Nazis, has survived to the present day; in Russia and what are now Lithuania,
Latvia, and Esthonia, the aristocrats were dispossessed by the Russian Revolution. In Hungary,
Rumania, and Poland they survived; in Eastern Poland they were "liquidated" by the Soviet
government in 1940. The Soviet government, however, has done everything in its power to
substitute collective farming rather than peasant proprietorship throughout Russia.
In England the development has been more complex. In Locke's day, the position of the rural
labourer was mitigated by the existence of commons, on which he had important rights, which
enabled him to