Is a horse property? Here the answer should be: not in the strict and technical sense; a chattel, whether it be a horse, or a chair, or desk, or automobile, or a locomotive, is the subject of property.

The property is the right or interest which one has in it, thus several may have an interest in the same chattel.

The owner of an automobile may desire to borrow money upon it. He gives a chattel mortgage and retains possession. In such case two people have a property interest in the automobile, the mortgagor and the mortgagee.

The same illustration is applied to land. The land is the subject of property, and in the law of real property this property right is called an estate or interest in land.

ANOTHER ILLUSTRATION.

The legislature of a State passes a statute taking away or restricting the right to sell property of any kind. Such a law is considered as taking, to the extent provided, the property, although the thing which is the subject is not touched. Such acts can be justified only by some legal reason, as the police power, and such laws must operate equally upon all for such a law deprives one of a right which is property.

ANOTHER EXAMPLE.

In the complex state of our society there are a great many public service corporations, i. e., corporations supplying water, light, gas, transportation, etc.

The legislature acting on behalf of the public quite frequently assumes the power to regulate the rate, i. e., fix the price which the corporation shall charge the persons whom it serves. Such laws always involve some

supposed curtailment of the absolute right which, but for the law, could be fixed by private contract.

So such legislation is frequently attacked because it is said the property of the company is taken. Such was the controversy in the recent important case in New York, called the Eighty Cent Gas case.

Such laws have been quite generally upheld, and always so unless the law is unreasonable.

§ 75. Concluding observations. We have now seen the meaning of the words "law" and "rights," and that rights are creations of law.

We have also seen that the words "person" and "thing" and "property" have each, in legal parlance a meaning different from the meaning often ascribed to them in common parlance.

"Person" is to be distinguished from "man” and “individual," though including them.

"Property" is not at all synonymous with "things," but relates to the right or interest in them; and the word "thing," in English and American jurisprudence, has a meaning broader than the common use of the word "thing," and narrower than the Roman use of the word "res."

In our jurisprudence it included those objects which were denominated choses in action, and excluded all rights of a purely personal nature. Blackstone's description of property, and his treatment of it, correspond very nearly to the notions as they obtained in England in his day. He clearly indicates that he does not treat a horse, or land, or a chose, as property, but as the subjects of property.

CHAPTER VI.

RIGHTS, DUTIES, OBLIGATIONS AND REMEDIES.

§ 76. Importance and confused condition of the subject. In the whole range of English juridical literature one will look in vain for an adequate treatment of the jural ideas involved in the words Right, Duty, Obligation, and Injury. The best is that of Spence, but from the fact that it is made but an incident to his history of the rise and progress of Equity Jurisdiction it has not attracted the attention it deserves, for Spence's performance is perhaps the greatest British law book of the Nineteenth Century. The reader who has followed the preceding pages need hardly be told that within these four words must be found the most vital principles of the law-for it is clear that the establishment of these upon a clear, fixed and stable foundation with appropriate means of protection and redress is among the principal functions of all law. No apology need therefore be offered for treating these subjects carefully, even minutely; on the contrary no one who aspires to know the law can excuse himself from knowing the meaning of these fundamental words.

In the preceding chapter an endeavor was made to present the legal conception of the terms which designate the three departments into which the Roman jurists di

vided the great body of the civil law-person, thing, action.

The changed meaning ascribed to the same expressions by English jurists is there also pointed out, and it is shown that subjects are by the latter transferred from one department of law to another, according to the differing conception of these words.

In the course of that discussion the word "Right" was defined, and the word "obligation" mentioned in connection with the Roman distribution of rights of persons.

The word chose was also introduced as a word adopted into the English law from a source other than the Roman law, and that these were divided into choses in possession and choses in action.

The English conception of these words, quite different from the meaning ascribed to them in the Roman law, resulted in radical departures in formal arrangement of English treatises.

The adoption of a new classification of certain rights under the designation choses in possession and choses in action, and the subordination of one of the great departments of the Roman classification, viz., obligation, brought about radical changes in the nomenclature.

New conceptions of the nature of property, ownership or dominion with the use of the expressions real and personal to designate respectively rights in land and in movable things and choses, rendered the expression of the English law by the English jurists, who uniformly persist in making use of words borrowed from the civil law with an entirely new meaning, simply distracting to a

civilian, and only intelligible to an English reader by the use of labored qualifying phrases.

The American student encounters all of these difficulties and others in addition, occasioned by reason of new elements introduced and still further changes and variations in the meaning of old words.

It will perhaps facilitate the understanding of the nature and classification of rights and obligations to present briefly the ancient meaning and classification of these words in the systems whence they are derived.

In the last chapter we saw that Blackstone translated jura personarum rights of persons, and jura rerum rights. of things. To these words he added the qualifying phrases, segregating rights into two primary classes: Those "connected with the persons of men" and those "unconnected with his person."

All the changes from civilian methods result from these changes-the perverted use of person and the new conception of res.

DR. HAMMOND'S EXPLANATION.

"In the classical jurists, and among civilians generally (until within the last century), the term res and the term 'object of a right' are strictly synonymous. No right could be conceived the object of which might not be designated res. The right of a man to security, to liberty, to reputation, to health, had for the object of each, respectively, a 'thing'-res-although that 'thing' was merely the right itself, so to speak, objectified. Hence these rights, as well as any others, could be included among the jura rerumrights considered in reference to their objects; they gave