In the country at large the property interests involved in the production
and sale of alcoholic beverages are already excommunicated. The unreformed
"best society" may still tolerate the presence of persons whose fortunes
are derived from breweries or distilleries; but the great mass of the
social-minded would deny them fire and water. In how many districts would
a well organized political machine urge persons thus enriched as
candidates for Congress, the bench or even the school board? In the
prohibition territory excommunication of such property interests has been
followed by outlawry. The saloon in Maine and Kansas exists by the same
title as did Robin Hood: the inefficiency of the law. On the road to
excommunication is private property in the wretched shacks that shelter
the city's poor. Outlawry is not far distant. "These tenements must go."
Will they go? Ask of the police, who pick over the wreckage upon the
subsidence of a wave of reform. Many a rookery, officially abolished, will
be found still tenanted, and yielding not one income, but two, one for the
owner and another for the police. The property represented by enterprises
paying low wages, working men for long hours or under unhealthful
conditions, or employing children, is almost ripe for excommunication.
Pillars of society and the church have already been seen tottering on
account of revelations of working conditions in factories from which they
receive dividends. Property "affected by a public use," that is,
investments in the instrumentalities of public service, is becoming a
compromising possession. We are already somewhat suspicious of the
personal integrity and political honor of those who receive their incomes
from railways or electric lighting plants; and the odor of gas stocks is
unmistakable. Even the land, once the retreat of high birth and serene
dignity, is beginning to exhale a miasma of corruption. "Enriched by
unearned increment"--who wishes such an epitaph? A convention is to be
held in a western city in this very year, to announce to the world that
the delegates and their constituencies--all honest lovers of mankind--will
refuse in future to recognize any private title to land or other natural
resources. Holders of such property, by continuing to be such, will place
themselves beyond the pale of human society, and will forfeit all claim to
sympathy when the day dawns for the universal confiscation of land.