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.

III

The existence of categories of property interests resting under a growing
weight of social disapprobation, is giving rise to a series of problems in
private ethics that seem almost to demand a rehabilitation of the art of
casuistry. A very intelligent and conscientious lady of the writer's
acquaintance became possessed, by inheritance, of a one-fourth interest in
a Minneapolis building the ground floor of which is occupied by a saloon.
Her first endeavor was to persuade her partners to secure a cancellation
of the liquor dealer's lease. This they refused to do, on the ground that
the building in question is, by location, eminently suited to its present
use, but very ill suited to any other; and that, moreover, the lessee
would immediately reopen his business on the opposite corner. To yield to
their partner's desire would th