controlled wealth; chance finds, as gifts of value or lost and abandoned goods; goods assigned to one by authority; wealth inherited; illegal gains by robbery; goods secured on credit; gifts either of things or of services.  The many methods by which incomes are distributed to the persons making up a society may be grouped in the following five general classes:  force, status, charity, competition, and authority.  These will be discussed in due order.

Sec. 2. #Distribution by force and by status.# Distribution by force is the most primitive mode of distribution.  The stronger takes from the weaker.  Forceful distribution still persists in the form of crime, and if we include fraud within the term it still affects an enormous amount of income.  The lawless take whatever they can, and the supporters and officers of the law do what they can to check the acts.  Slavery is distribution by force, as is the levying of war indemnities from a conquered people.

Distribution may be by status, or set rules and customs.  In this case men receive incomes that are independent of their efforts and outside of their control.  Distribution by status is guided neither by the personal merit of the recipients nor by the value of their direct services, but the merits and acts of men not living.  Feudal society was built on status.  Men were born to certain privileges and positions; they inherited property which could neither be bought nor sold; they followed trades which could rarely be entered by any outside of favored families.  Caste in India and in other Oriental countries regulates a large part of the life of the people.

This method still prevails to a greater extent in our society than is usually recognized.[2] By public opinion and by prejudice, status is still maintained in respect to the choice of occupations even where the law has formally abolished it, as is seen in modern race problems, in western countries to-day inheritance of property is the main legal form of status and it shades off into other forms of distribution.  Private property must find its justification in social expediency.[3] There is no feature of it that is more questioned than is the right of inheritance.

Sec. 3. #Social effects of the right to transmit property.# The right to transmit property by inheritance or by bequest may be judged with reference to its effects upon the giver, upon the receiver, and upon society at large.  It is well to take these three points of view.  The right to dispose of property either during life or at death has undoubtedly in many ways a good effect upon the character of men.  It stimulates the husband and father to provide for his wife and children, and spurs others to continued economic activity.  There is a joy in giving, a joy in the power to bestow one’s wealth upon those one loves, or as one pleases.  Much of the existing wealth probably never would have been created if men had not had this right.  But there is a limit to the working of