t
facts of monetary necessity remain the rulers of life. Every youth who
must sell his art and capacity for gain, every girl who must sell
herself for money, is one more sacrifice to the Minotaur of Private
Ownership--before the Theseus of Socialism comes.

Opponents of Socialism, ignoring all these things and inventing with
that profusion which is so remarkable a trait of the anti-Socialist
campaign, are wont to declare that we, whose first and last thought is
the honour and betterment of life, seek to destroy all beauty and
freedom in love, accuse us of aiming at some "human stud farm." The
reader will measure the justice of that by the next chapter, but here
I would say that just as the private ownership of all that is
necessary to humanity, except the air and sunlight and a few things
that it has been difficult to appropriate, debases work and all the
common services of life, so also it taints and thwarts the emotions,
and degrades the intimate physical and emotional existence of an
innumerable multitude of people.

All this amounts to a huge impoverishment of life, a loss of beauty
and discrimination of rich and subtle values. Human existence to-day
is a mere tantalizing intimation of what it might be. It is
frostbitten and dwarfed from palace to slum. It is not only that a
great mass of our population is deprived of space, beauty and
pleasure, but that a large proportion of such space, beauty and
pleasure as there are in the world must necessarily have a
meretricious taint and be in the nature of things bought and made for
pay.

Sec. 3.

If there is one profession more than another in which devotion is
implied and assumed, it is that of the doctor. It happens that on the
morning when this chapter was drafted, I came upon the paragraph that
follows; it seemed to me to supply just one striking concrete instance
of how life is degraded by our present system, and to offer me a
convenient text for a word or so more upon this question between gain
and service. It is a little vague in its reference to Mr. Tompkins "of
Birmingham," and I should not be surprised if it were a considerable
exaggeration of what really happened. But it is true enough to life in
this, that it is a common practice, a necessity with doctors in poor
neighbourhoods to insist inexorably upon a fee before attendance.

"A case of medical inhumanity is reported from Birmingham. A
poor man named Tompkins was taken seriously ill early on