WOULD MODERN SOCIALISM ABOLISH ALL PROPERTY?
§ 1.
Having in the previous chapter cleared up a considerable mass of
misconception and possibility of misrepresentation about the attitude
of Socialism to the home, let us now devote a little more attention to
the current theory of property and say just exactly where Modern
Socialism stands in that matter.
The plain fact of the case is that the Socialist, whether he wanted to
or no, would no more be able to abolish personal property altogether
than he would be able to abolish the human liver. The extension of
one's personality to things outside oneself is indeed as natural and
instinctive a thing as eating. But because the liver is necessary and
inevitable, there is no reason why it should be enlarged to
uncomfortable proportions, and because eating is an unconquerable
instinct there is no excuse for repletion. The position of the modern
Socialist is that the contemporary idea of personal property is
enormously exaggerated and improperly extended to things that ought
not to be "private"; not that it is not a socially most useful and
desirable idea within its legitimate range.
There can be no doubt that many of those older writers who were
"Socialists before Socialism," Plato, for instance, and Sir Thomas
More, did very roundly abolish private property altogether. They were
extreme Communists, and so were many of the earlier Socialists; in
More's Utopia, doors might not be fastened, they stood open; one
hadn't even a private room. These earlier writers wished to insist
upon the need of self-abnegation in the ideal State, and to startle
and confound, they insisted overmuch. The early Christians, one
gathers, were almost completely communistic, and that interesting
experiment in Christian Socialism (of a rather unorthodox type of
Christianity), the American Oneida community, was successfully
communistic in every respect for many years. But the modern Socialist
is not a communist; the modern Socialist, making his scheme of social
reconstruction for the whole world and for every type of character,
recognizes the entire impracticability of such dreams, recognizing,
too, it may be, the sacrifice of human personality and distinction
such ideals involve.
The word "property," one must remember, is a slightly evasive word.
Absolute property hardly exists--absolute, that is to say, in the
sense of unlimited right of disposal; almost all property is
incomplete and relative. A man, under our present laws, has no
absolute property even in his own life; he is restrained from suicide
and punished if he attempt it. He may not go offensively filthy nor
indecently clad; there are limits to his free use of his body. The
owner of a house, of land, of a factory is subject to all sorts of
limitations, building regulations for example, and so is the owner of
horse or dog. Nor again is any property exempt from taxation. Even now
property is a limited thing, and it is well to bear that much in mind.
It can be defined as something one may do "what one likes with,"
subject only to this or that specific restriction, and at any time, it
would seem, the State is at least legally entitled to increase the
quantity and modify the nature of the restriction. The extremest
private property is limited to a certain sanity and humanity in its
use.
In that sense every adult now-a-days has private property in his or
her own person, in clothes, in such personal implements as hand-tools,
as a bicycle, as a cricket-bat or golf-sticks. In quite the same sense
would he have it under Socialism so far as these selfsame things go.
The sense of property in such things is almost instinctive; my little
boys of five and three have the keenest sense of _mine_ and (almost,
if not quite so vividly) _thine_ in the matter of toys and garments.
The disposition of modern Socialism is certainly no more to override
these natural tendencies than it is to fly in the face of human nature
in regard to the home. The disposition of modern Socialism is indeed
far more in the direction of confirming and insuring this natural
property. And again modern Socialism has no designs upon the money in
a man's pocket. It is quite true that the earlier and extreme
Socialist theorists did in their communism find no use for money, but
I do not think there are any representative Socialists now who do not
agree that the State must pay and receive in money, that money is
indispensable to human freedom. The featurelessness of money, its
universal convertibility, gives human beings a latitude of choice and
self-expression in its spending that is inconceivable without its use.
All such property Socialism will ungrudgingly sustain, and it will
equally sustain property in books and objects of æsthetic
satisfaction, in furnishing, in the apartments or dwelling-house a man
or woman occupies and in their household implements. It will sustain
far more property than the average working-class man has to-day. Nor
will it prevent savings or accumulations, if men do not choose to
expend their earnings--nor need it interfere with lending. How far it
will permit or countenance usury is another question altogether. There
will no doubt remain, after all the work-a-day needs of the world have
been met by a scientific public organization of the general property
in Nature, a great number of businesses and enterprises and new and
doubtful experiments outside the range of legitimate State activity.
In these, interested and prosperous people will embark their surplus
money as shareholders in a limited liability company, making
partnership profits or losses in an entirely proper manner. But
whether there should be debentures and mortgages or preference shares,
or suchlike manipulatory distinctions, or interest in any shape or
form, I am inclined to doubt. A money-lender should share risk as well
as profit--that is surely the moral law in lending that forbids usury;
he should not be allowed to bleed a failing business with his
inexorable percentage and so eat up the ordinary shareholder or
partner any more than the landlord should be allowed to eat up the
failing tenant for rent. That was once the teaching of Christianity,
and I do not know enough of the history or spiritual development of
the Catholic Church to tell when she became what she now appears to
be--the champion of the rent-exacting landlord and the usurer against
Socialism. It is the present teaching of Socialism. If usury obtains
at all under the Socialist State, if inexorable repayments are to be
made in certain cases, it will, I conceive, be a State monopoly. The
State will be the sole banker for every hoard and every enterprise,
just as it will be the universal landlord and the universal fire and
accident and old age insurance office. In money matters as in public
service and administration, it will stand for the species, the
permanent thing behind every individual accident and adventure.
Posthumous property, that is to say the power to bequeath and the
right to inherit things, will also persist in a mitigated state under
Socialism. There is no reason whatever why it should not do so. There
is a strong natural sentiment in favour of the institution of
heirlooms, for example; one feels a son might well own--though he
should certainly not sell--the intimate things his father desires to
leave him. The pride of descent is an honourable one, the love for
one's blood, and I hope that a thousand years from now some descendant
will still treasure an obsolete weapon here, a picture there, or a
piece of faint and faded needlework from our days and the days before
our own. One may hate inherited privileges and still respect a family
tree.
Widows and widowers again have clearly a kind of natural property in
the goods they have shared with the dead; in the home, in the garden
close, in the musical instruments and books and pleasant home-like
things. Now, in nine cases out of ten, we do in effect bundle the
widow out; she remains nominally owner of the former home, but she has
to let it furnished or sell it, to go and live in a boarding-house or
an exiguous flat.
Even perhaps a proportion of accumulated money may reasonably go to
friend or kin. It is a question of public utility; Socialism has done
with absolute propositions in all such things, and views these
problems now as questions of detail, matters for fine discriminations.
We want to be quit of pedantry. All that property which is an
enlargement of personality, the modern Socialist seeks to preserve; it
is that exaggerated property that gives power over the food and needs
of one's fellow-creatures, property and inheritance in land, in
industrial machinery, in the homes of others and in the usurer's grip
upon others, that he seeks to destroy. The more doctrinaire Socialists
will tell you they do not object to property for use and consumption,
but only to property in "the means of production," but I do not choose
to resort to over-precise definitions. The general intention is clear
enough, the particular instance requires particular application. But
it is just because we modern Socialists want every one to have play
for choice and individual expression in all these realities of
property that we object to this monstrous property of a comparatively
small body of individuals expropriating the world.
§ 2.
I am inclined to think--but here I speak beyond the text of
contemporary Socialist literature--that in certain directions
Socialism, while destroying property, will introduce a compensatory
element by creating rights. For example, Socialism will certainly
destroy all private property in land and in natural material and
accumulated industrial resources; it will be the universal landlord
and the universal capitalist, but that does not mean that we shall all
be the State's tenants-at-will. There can be little doubt that the
Socialist State will recognize the rights of the improving occupier
and the beneficial hirer. It is manifestly in accordance both with
justice and public policy that a man who takes a piece of land and
creates a value on it--by making a vineyard, let us say--is entitled
to security of tenure, is to be dispossessed only in exceptional
circumstances and with ample atonement. If a man who takes an
agricultural or horticultural holding comes to feel that there he will
toil and there later he will rest upon his labours, I do not think a
rational Socialism will war against this passion for the vine and
fig-tree. If it absolutely refuses the idea of freehold, it will
certainly not repudiate leasehold. I think the State may prove a far
more generous and sentimental landlord in many things than any private
person.
In another correlated direction, too, Socialism is quite reconcilable
with a finer quality of property than our landowner-ridden Britain
allows to any but the smallest minority. I mean property in the house
one occupies.... If I may indulge in a quite unauthorized speculation,
I am inclined to think there may be two collateral methods of
home-building in the future. For many people always there will need to
be houses to which they may come and go for longer and shorter
tenancies and which they will in no manner own. Now-a-days such people
are housed in the exploits of the jerry-builder--all England is
unsightly with their meagre pretentious villas and miserable cottages
and tenement houses. Such homes in the Socialist future will certainly
be supplied by the local authority, but they will be fair, decent
houses by good architects, fitted to be clean and lit, airy and
convenient, the homes of civilized people, sightly things altogether
in a generous and orderly world. But in addition there will be the
prosperous private person with a taste that way, building himself a
home as a lease-holder under the public landlord. For him, too, there
will be a considerable measure of property, a measure of property that
might even extend to a right, if not of bequest, then at any rate of
indicating a preference among his possible successors in the occupying
tenancy....
Then there is a whole field of proprietary sensations in relation to
official duties and responsibility. Men who have done good work in any
field are not to be lightly torn from it. A medical officer of health
who has done well in his district, a teacher who has taught a
generation of a town, a man who has made a public garden, have a moral
lien upon their work for all their lives. They do not get it under our
present conditions. I know that it will be quite easy to say all this
is a question of administration and detail. It is. But it is,
nevertheless, important to state it clearly here, to make it evident
that the coming of Socialism involves no destruction of this sort of
identification of a man with the thing he does; this identification
that is so natural and desirable--that this living and legitimate
sense of property will if anything be encouraged and its claims
strengthened under Socialism. To-day that particularly living sort of
property-sense is often altogether disregarded. Every day one hears of
men who have worked up departments in businesses, men who have created
values for employers, men who have put their lives into an industrial
machine, being flung aside because their usefulness is over, or out of
personal pique, or to make way for favourites, for the employer's son
or cousin or what not, without any sort of appeal or compensation.
Ownership is autocracy; at the best it is latent injustice in all such
matters of employment.
Then again, consider the case of the artist and the inventor who are
too often forced by poverty now to sell their early inventions for the
barest immediate subsistence. Speculators secure these initial
efforts--sometimes to find them worthless, sometimes to discover in
them the sources of enormous wealth. In no matter is it more difficult
to estimate value than in the case of creative work; few geniuses are
immediately recognized, and the history of art, literature and
invention is full of Chattertons and Savages who perished before
recognition came, and of Dickenses who sold themselves unwisely.
Consider the immense social benefit if the creator even now possessed
an inalienable right to share in the appreciation of his work. Under
Socialism it would for all his life be his--and the world's, and
controllable by him. He would be free to add, to modify, to repeat.
In all these respects modern Socialism tends to create and confirm
property and rights, the property of the user, the rights of the
creator. It is quite other property it tends to destroy; the property,
the claim, of the creditor, the mortgagee, the landlord, and usurer,
the forestaller, gambling speculator, monopolizer and absentee.... In
very truth Socialism would destroy no property at all, but only that
sham property that, like some wizard-cast illusion, robs us all.
§ 3.
And now we are discussing the Socialist attitude towards property, it
may be well to consider a little group of objections that are often
made in anti-Socialist tracts. I refer more particularly to a certain
hard case, the hard case of the Savings of the Virtuous Small Man.
The reader, if he is at all familiar with this branch of controversial
literature, probably knows how that distressing case is put. One is
presented with a poor man of inconceivable industry, goodness and
virtue; he has worked, he has saved; at last, for the security of his
old age, he holds a few shares in a business, a "bit of land"
or--perhaps through a building society--house property. Would we--the
Anti-Socialist chokes with emotion--so alter the world as to rob him
of _that_? ... The Anti-Socialist gathers himself together with an
effort and goes on to a still more touching thought ... the widow![13]
[13] "The ethical case for slavery in the Southern States of
America," my friend Mr. Graham Wallas reminds me, "was
largely argued on the instance of the widow 'with a few
strong slaves.'"
Well, I think there are assurances in the previous section to disabuse
the reader's mind a little in this matter. This solicitude for the
Saving Small Man and for the widow and orphan seems to me one of the
least honest of all the anti-Socialist arguments. The man "who has
saved a few pounds," the poor widow woman and her children clinging to
some scrap of freehold are thrust forward to defend the harvest of the
landlord and the financier. Let us look at the facts of the case and
see how this present economic system of ours really does treat the
"stocking" of the poor.
In the first place it does not guarantee to the small investor any
security for his little hoard at all. He comes into the world of
investment ill-informed, credulous or only unintelligently
suspicious--and he is as a class continually and systematically deprived
of his little accumulations. One great financial operation after another
in the modern world, as any well-informed person can witness, eats up
the small investor. Some huge, vastly respectable-looking enterprise is
floated with a capital of so many scores or hundreds of thousands,
divided into so many thousands of ordinary shares, so many five or six
per cent. preference, so much debentures. It begins its career with a
flourish of prosperity, the ordinary shares for a few years pay seven,
eight, ten per cent. The Virtuous Small Man provides for his widow and
his old age by buying this estimable security. Its price clambers to a
premium, and so it passes slowly and steadily from its first speculative
holder into the hands of the investing public. Then comes a slow, quiet,
downward movement, a check at the interim dividend, a rapid contraction.
Consider such a case as that of the great British Electric Traction
Company which began with ordinary shares at ten, which clambered above
twenty-one (21-7/8), which is now (October 1907) fluctuating about two.
Its six per cent, preference shares have moved between fourteen and five
and a half. Its ordinary shares represent a total capital of
£1,333,010, and its preference £1,614,370; so that here in this one
concern we have a phantom appearance and disappearance of over two
million pounds' worth of value and a real disappearance of perhaps half
that amount. It requires only a very slight knowledge of the world to
convince one that the bulk of that sum was contributed by the modest
investments of mediocre and small people out of touch with the real
conditions of the world of finance.
These little investors, it is said, are the bitter champions of
private finance against the municipalities and Socialists. One wonders
why.
One could find a score of parallels and worse instances representing
in the end many scores of millions of pounds taken from the investing
public in the last few years. I will, however, content myself with one
sober quotation from the New York _Journal of Commerce_, which the
reader will admit is not likely to be a willing witness for Socialism.
Commenting on the testimony of the principal witness, Mr. Harriman, of
the Illinois Central Railroad, before the Inter-State Commerce
Commission (March 1907), it says:--
"On his own admission he was one of a 'combine' of four who
got possession of the Chicago and Alton Railroad, and
immediately issued bonds for $40,000,000, out of the proceeds
of which they paid themselves a dividend of 30 per cent, on
the stock they held, besides taking the bonds at 65 and
subsequently selling them at 90 or more, some of them to life
insurance companies with which Mr. Harriman had some kind of
relation. There were no earnings or surplus out of which the
dividend could be paid, but the books of the company were
juggled by transferring some $12,000,000 expended for
betterments to capital account as a sort of bookkeeping basis
for the performance.
"Besides this, the Chicago and Alton Railroad was transformed
into a 'railway,' and a capitalization of a little under
$40,000,000 was swollen to nearly $123,000,000 to cover an
actual expenditure in improvements of $22,500,000. In the
process there was an injection of about $60,600,000 of 'water'
into the stock held by the four, some of which was sold to the
Union Pacific, of which Mr. Harriman was president, and more
was 'unloaded' upon the Rock Island. Mr. Harriman refused to
tell how much he made out of that operation.
"It shows how some of our enormous fortunes are made, as well
as what motives and purposes sometimes prevail in the use of
the power entrusted to the directors and officers of
corporations. It is a simple and elementary principle that all
values are created by the productive activity of capital,
labour and ability in industrial operations of one kind and
another. No wealth comes out of nothing, but all must be
produced and distributed, and what one gets by indirection
another loses or fails to get. The personal profit of these
speculative operations in which the capital, credit and power
of corporations are used by those entrusted with their
direction come out of the general body of stockholders whose
interests are sacrificed, or out of the public investors who
are lured and deceived, or out of shippers who are overtaxed
for the service for which railroads are chartered, or out of
all these in varying proportions. In other words they are the
fruits of robbery."
So that you see it is not only untrue that Socialism would rob a poor
man of his virtuously acquired "bit of property," but the direct
contrary is the truth, that the present system, non-Socialism, is now
constantly _butchering thrift_! Simple people believe the great
financiers win and lose money to each other. They are not--to put it
plainly--such fools. They use the public, and the public goes on being
used, as a perpetual source of freshly accumulated wealth. I know one
case of a man of fifty who serves in a shop, a most industrious,
competent man, who has been saving and investing money all his life in
what he had every reason to believe were safe and sober businesses; he
has been denying himself pleasures, cramping his life to put by about
a third of his wages every year since he was two-and-twenty, and
to-day he has not got his keep for a couple of years, and his only
security against disablement and old age is his subscription to a
Friendly Society, a society which I have a very strong suspicion is no
better off than most other Friendly Societies--and that is by no means
well off, and by no means confident of the future.
It is possible to argue that the small man ought to take more pains
about his investments, but, as a matter of fact, investing money
securely and profitably is a special occupation of extraordinary
complexity, and the common man with a few hundred pounds has no more
chance in that market than he would have under water in Sydney Harbour
amidst a shoal of sharks. It may be said that he is greedy, wants too
much interest, but that is nonsense. One of the crudest gulfs into
which small savings have gone in the case of the British public has
been the trap of Consols, which pay at the present price less than
three per cent. Servants and working men with Post Office Savings'
Bank accounts were urged, tempted and assisted to invest in this
solemn security--even when it stood at 114. Those who did so have now
(November 1907) lost almost a third of their money.
It is scarcely too much to say that a very large proportion of our
modern great properties, tramway systems, railways, gas-works, bread
companies, have been created for their present owners the debenture
holders and mortgagers, the great capitalists, by the unintentional
altruism of that voluntary martyr, the Saving Small Man.
Of course the habitual saver can insure with an insurance company for
his old age and against all sorts of misadventures, and because of the
Government interference with "private enterprise" in that sort of
business, be reasonably secure; but under Socialism he would be able
to do that with absolute security in the State Insurance Office--if
the universal old age pension did not satisfy him. That, however, is
beside our present discussion. I am writing now only of the sort of
property that Socialism would destroy, and to show how little benefit
or safety it brings to the small owner now. The unthinking rich prate
"thrift" to the poor, and grow richer by a half-judicious,
half-unconscious absorption of the resultant savings; that, in brief,
is the grim humour of our present financial method.
It is not only in relation to investments that this absorption of
small parcels of savings goes on. In every town the intelligent and
sympathetic observer may see, vivid before the eyes of all who are not
blind by use and wont, the slow subsidence of petty accumulations, The
lodging-house and the small retail shop are, as it were, social
"destructors"; all over the country they are converting hopeful,
enterprising, ill-advised people with a few score or hundreds of
pounds, slowly, inevitably into broken-hearted failures. It is, to my
mind, the crudest aspect of our economic struggle. In the little High
Street of Sandgate, over which my house looks, I should say between a
quarter and a third of the shops are such downward channels from
decency to despair; they are sanctioned, inevitable citizen breakers.
Now it is a couple of old servants opening a "fancy" shop or a tobacco
shop, now it is a young couple plunging into the haberdashery, now it
is a new butcher or a new fishmonger or a grocer. This perpetual
procession of bankruptcies has made me lately shun that
pleasant-looking street, that in my unthinking days I walked through
cheerfully enough. The doomed victims have a way of coming to the
doors at first and looking out politely and hopefully. There is a rich
and lucrative business done by certain wholesale firms in starting the
small dealer in almost every branch of retail trade; they fit up his
shop, stock him, take his one or two hundred pounds and give him
credit for forty or fifty. The rest of his story is an impossible
struggle to pay rent and get that debt down. Things go on for a time
quite bravely. I go furtively and examine the goods in the window,
with a dim hope that this time something really will come off; I learn
reluctantly from my wife that they are no better than any one else's,
and rather dearer than those of the one or two solid and persistent
shops that do the steady business of the place. Perhaps I see the new
people going to church once or twice very respectably, as I set out
for a Sunday walk, and if they are a young couple the husband usually
wears a silk hat. Presently the stock in the window begins to
deteriorate in quantity and quality, and then I know that credit is
tightening. The proprietor no longer comes to the door, and his first
bright confidence is gone. He regards one now through the darkling
panes with a gloomy animosity. He suspects one all too truly of
dealing with the "Stores." ... Then suddenly he has gone; the savings
are gone, and the shop--like a hungry maw--waits for a new victim.
There is the simple common tragedy of the little shop; the landlord of
the house has _his_ money all right, the ground landlord has, of
course, every penny of his money, the kindly wholesalers are well out
of it, and the young couple or the old people, as the case may be, are
looking for work or the nearest casual ward--just as though there was
no such virtue as thrift in the world.
The particular function of the British lodging-house--though the
science of economics is silent on this point--is to use up the last
strength of the trusty old servant and the plucky widow. These people
will invest from two or three hundred to a thousand pounds in order to
gain a bare subsistence by toiling for boarders and lodgers. It is
their idea of a safe investment. They can see it all the time. All
over England this process goes on. The curious inquirer may see every
phase for himself by simply looking for rooms among the apartment
houses of such a region as Camden Town, London; he will realize more
and more surely as he goes about that none of these people gain money,
none of them ever recover the capital they sink, they are happy if
they die before their inevitable financial extinction. It is so
habitual with people to think of classes as stable, of a butcher or a
baker as a man who keeps a shop of a certain sort at a certain level
throughout a long and indeterminate life, that it may seem incredible
to many readers that those two typically thrifty classes, the
lodging-letting householder and the small retailer, are maintained by
a steady supply of failing individuals; the fact remains that it is
so. Their little savings are no good to them, investments and business
beginnings mock them alike: steadily, relentlessly our competitive
system eats them up.
It is said that no class of people in the community is more hostile to
Socialism and Socialistic legislation than these small owners and
petty investors, these small ratepayers. They do not understand. Rent
they consider in the nature of things like hunger and thirst; the
economic process that dooms the weak enterprise to ruin is beyond the
scope of their intelligence; but the rate-collector who calls and
calls again for money, for more money, to educate "other people's
children," to "keep paupers in luxury," to "waste upon roads and light
and trams," seems the agent of an unendurable wrong. So the poor
creatures go out pallidly angry to vote down that hated thing
municipal enterprise, and to make still more scope for that big
finance that crushes them in the wine-press of its exploitation. It is
a wretched and tragic antagonism, for which every intelligent
Socialist must needs have sympathy, which he must meet with
patience--and lucid explanations. If the public authority took rent
there would be no need of rates; that is the more obvious proposition.
But the ampler one is the cruelty, the absurdity and the social injury
of the constant consumption of unprotected savings which is an
essential part of our present system.
It is a doctrinaire and old-fashioned Socialism that quarrels with the
little hoard; the quarrel of modern Socialism is with the landowner
and the great capitalist who devour it.
§ 4.
While we are discussing the true attitude of modern Socialism to
property, it will be well to explain quite clearly the secular change
of opinion that is going on in the Socialist ranks in regard to the
process of expropriation. Even in the case of those sorts of property
that Socialism repudiates, property in land, natural productions,
inherited business capital and the like, Socialism has become
humanized and rational from its first extreme and harsh positions.
The earlier Socialism was fierce and unjust to owners. "Property is
Robbery," said Proudhon, and right down to the nineties Socialism kept
too much of the spirit of that proposition. The property owner was to
be promptly and entirely deprived of his goods, and to think himself
lucky he was not lynched forthwith as an abominable rascal. The first
Basis of the Fabian Society, framed so lately as 1884, seems to
repudiate "compensation," even a partial compensation of property
owners, though in its practical proposals the Fabian Society has
always admitted compensatory arrangements. The exact words of the
Basis are "without compensation though not without such relief to
expropriated individuals as may seem fit to the community." The
wording is pretty evidently the result of a compromise between modern
views and older teachings. If the Fabian Society were rewriting its
Basis now I doubt if any section would insist even upon that
eviscerated "without compensation."
Now property is not robbery. It may be a mistake, it may be unjust and
socially disadvantageous to recognize private property in these great
common interests, but every one concerned, and the majority of the
property owners certainly, held and hold in good faith, and do their
best by the light they have. We live to-day in a vast tradition of
relationships in which the rightfulness of that kind of private
property is assumed, and suddenly, instantly, to deny and abolish it
would be--I write this as a convinced and thorough Socialist--quite
the most dreadful catastrophe human society could experience. For what
sort of provisional government should we have in that confusion?
Expropriation must be a gradual process, a process of economic and
political readjustment, accompanied at every step by an explanatory
educational advance. There is no reason why a cultivated property
owner should not welcome and hasten its coming. Modern Socialism is
prepared to compensate him, not perhaps "fully" but reasonably, for
his renunciations and to avail itself of his help, to relieve him of
his administrative duties, his excess of responsibility for estate and
business. It does not grudge him a compensating annuity nor
terminating rights of user. It has no intention of obliterating him
nor the things he cares for. It wants not only to socialize his
possessions, but to socialize his achievement in culture and all that
leisure has taught him of the possibilities of life. It wants all men
to become as fine as he. Its enemy is not the rich man but the
aggressive rich man, the usurer, the sweater, the giant plunderer, who
are developing the latent evil of riches. It repudiates altogether the
conception of a bitter class-war between those who Have and those who
Have Not.
But this new tolerant spirit in method involves no weakening of the
ultimate conception. Modern Socialism sets itself absolutely against
the creation of new private property out of land, or rights or
concessions not yet assigned. All new great monopolistic enterprises
in transit, building and cultivation, for example, must from the first
be under public ownership. And the chief work of social statesmanship,
the secular process of government, must be the steady, orderly
resumption by the community, without violence and without delay, of
the land, of the apparatus of transit, of communication, of food
distribution and of all the great common services of mankind, and the
care and training of a new generation in their collective use and in
more civilized conceptions of living.