ranted to property interests in general, and ultimately of
the protection of the laws. It is with the rationality of what may be
called the excommunication and outlawing of special property interests,
that the present paper is concerned.

In passing, it is worth noting that the same ethical spirit that insists
upon fixing the responsibility for social ills upon particular property
interests--or property owners--insists with equal vehemence upon absolving
the propertyless evil-doer from personal responsibility for his acts. The
Los Angeles dynamiters were but victims: the crime in which they were
implicated was institutional, not personal. Their punishment was rank
injustice; inexpedient, moreover, as provocative of further crime, instead
of a means of repression. On the other hand, when it appears that the
congestion of the slum produces vice and disease, we are not urged by the
spokesmen of this ethical creed, to blame the chain of institutional
causes typified by scarcity of land, high prices of building materials,
the incapacity of a raw immigrant population to pay for better
habitations, or to appreciate the need for light and air. Rather, we are
urged to fix responsibility upon the individual owner who receives rent
from slum tenements. Perhaps we can not imprison him for his misdeeds, but
we can make him an object of public reproach; expel him from social
intercourse (if that, so often talked about, is ever done); fasten his
iniquities upon him if ever he seeks a post of trust or honor; and
ultimately we can deprive him of his property. Let him and his anti-social
interests be forever excommunicate, outlawed.

II

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