et the
Private Owner's raised demands--or freeze. Every such coal famine
reaps its harvest for death of old people and young children, and
wipes out so many thousands of savings' bank accounts and hoarded
shillings. Consider the essential imbecility of allowing the nation's
life and the nation's thrift to be preyed upon for profit in this way!
Is it possible to doubt that the civilized community of the future
will have to resume possession of all its stores of fuel, will keep
itself informed of the fluctuating needs of its population, and will
distribute and sell coal, gas and oil--not for the maximum profit, but
the maximum general welfare?[6]

[6] In Dakota, 1906-7, private enterprise led to a
particularly severe coal famine in the bitterest weather,
and the shortage was felt so severely that the population
rose and attacked and stopped passing coal-trains.

Another great branch of trade in which Private Ownership and private
freedom is manifestly antagonistic to the public welfare is the Drink
Traffic. Here we have a commodity, essentially a drug, its use readily
developing a vice, deleterious at its best, complex in composition,
and particularly susceptible to adulteration and the enhancement of
its attraction by poisonous ingredients and indeed to every sort of
mischievous secret manipulation. Probably nothing is more rarely found
pure and honest than beer or whisky; whisky begins to be blended and
doctored before it leaves the distillery. And we allow the production
and distribution of this drug of alcoholic drink to be from first to
last a source of private profit. We so contrive it that we put money
prizes upon the propaganda of drink. Is it any wonder that drink is
not only made by adulteration far more evil than it naturally is, but
that it is forced upon the public in every possible way?

"He tempts them to drink," I have heard a clergyman say of his village
publican. But what else did he think the publican was there for?--to
preach total abstinence? Naturally, inevitably, the whole of the Trade
is a propaganda--not of drunkenness, but of habitual heavy drinking.
The more successful propagandists, the great brewers and distillers
grow rich just in the proportion that people consume beer and spirits;
they gain honour and peerages in the measure of their success.

It is very interesting to the Socialist to trace the long struggle of
the temperance movement against its initial ide