ese conditions how can we
expect anything but dislocated, unsatisfying service at every turn?

The contemporary anti-Socialist moralist and the social satirist would
appeal to the Owner's sense of duty; he would declare in a
platitudinous tone that property had its duties as well as its rights,
and so forth. The Socialist, however, looks a little deeper, and puts
the thing differently. He brings both rights and duties to a keener
scrutiny. What underlies all these social disorders, he alleges, is
one simple thing, a misconception of property; an unreasonable
exaggeration, an accumulated, inherited exaggeration, of the idea of
property. He says the idea of private property, which is just and
reasonable in relation to intimate personal things, to clothes,
appliances, books, one's home or apartments, the garden one loves or
the horse one rides, has become unreasonably exaggerated until it
obsesses the world; that the freedom we have given men to claim and
own and hold the land upon which we must live, the fuel we burn, the
supplies of food and metal we require, the railways and ships upon
which our business goes, and to fix what prices they like to exact for
all these services, leads to the impoverishment and practical
enslavement of the mass of mankind.

And so he comes to his second main generalization, which I may perhaps
set out in these words:--

_The idea of the private ownership of things and the rights of owners
is enormously and mischievously exaggerated in the contemporary world.
The conception of private property has been extended to land, to
material, to the values and resources accumulated by past generations,
to a vast variety of things that are properly the inheritance of the
whole race. As a result of this, there is much obstruction and waste
of human energy and a huge loss of opportunity and freedom for the
mass of mankind; progress is retarded, there is a vast amount of
avoidable wretchedness, cruelty and injustice._

_The Socialist holds that the community as a whole should be
inalienably the owner and administrator of the land, of raw materials,
of values and resources accumulated from the past, and that private
property must be of a terminable nature, reverting to the community,
and subject to the general welfare._

This is the second of the twin generalizations upon which the edifice
of modern Socialism rests. Like the first, and like the practical side
of all sound religious teaching, it is a s