e at varying
intervals, supplying a house here and another there, until
finally, as it draws towards noon, their task is accomplished
and the street supplied with milk.

"The time actually occupied by one and another of these
distributors of milk makes in all about an hour and forty
minutes, six men and six horses and carts being required for
the purpose, and these equipages rattle along one after the
other, all over the district, through the greater part of the
day, in the same erratic and extraordinary manner."

Sec. 4.

Our imaginary visitor would probably quite fail to grasp the reasons
why we do not forthwith shake off this obstructive and harmful idea of
Private Ownership, dispossess our Landowners and so forth as gently as
possible, and set to work upon collective housing and the rest of it.
And so he would "exit wondering."

But that would be only the opening of the real argument. A competent
Anti-Socialist of a more terrestrial experience would have a great
many very effectual and very sound considerations to advance in
defence of the present system.

He might urge that our present way of doing things, though it was
sometimes almost as wasteful as Nature when fresh spawn or pollen
germs are scattered, was in many ways singularly congenial to the
infirmities of humanity. The idea of property is a spontaneous product
of the mortal mind; children develop it in the nursery, and are
passionately alive to the difference of _meum_ and _tuum_, and its
extension to land, subterranean products and wild free things, even if
it is under analysis a little unreasonable, was at least singularly
acceptable to humanity.

And there would be admirable soundness in all this. There can be
little or no doubt that the conception of personal ownership has in
the past contributed elements to human progress that could have come
through no other means. It has allowed private individuals in odd
corners to try experiments in new methods and new appliances, that the
general intelligence, such as it was, of the community could not have
understood. For all its faults, our present individualistic order
compared not simply with the communism of primitive tribes, but even
with the personal and largely illiterate control of the mediaeval
feudal governments, is a good efficient working method. I don't think
a Socialist need quarrel with the facts of history or human nature.
But he would urge that Priv