ion. Even now
property is a limited thing, and it is well to bear that much in mind.
It can be defined as something one may do "what one likes with,"
subject only to this or that specific restriction, and at any time, it
would seem, the State is at least legally entitled to increase the
quantity and modify the nature of the restriction. The extremest
private property is limited to a certain sanity and humanity in its
use.

In that sense every adult now-a-days has private property in his or
her own person, in clothes, in such personal implements as hand-tools,
as a bicycle, as a cricket-bat or golf-sticks. In quite the same sense
would he have it under Socialism so far as these selfsame things go.
The sense of property in such things is almost instinctive; my little
boys of five and three have the keenest sense of _mine_ and (almost,
if not quite so vividly) _thine_ in the matter of toys and garments.
The disposition of modern Socialism is certainly no more to override
these natural tendencies than it is to fly in the face of human nature
in regard to the home. The disposition of modern Socialism is indeed
far more in the direction of confirming and insuring this natural
property. And again modern Socialism has no designs upon the money in
a man's pocket. It is quite true that the earlier and extreme
Socialist theorists did in their communism find no use for money, but
I do not think there are any representative Socialists now who do not
agree that the State must pay and receive in money, that money is
indispensable to human freedom. The featurelessness of money, its
universal convertibility, gives human beings a latitude of choice and
self-expression in its spending that is inconceivable without its use.

All such property Socialism will ungrudgingly sustain, and it will
equally sustain property in books and objects of aesthetic
satisfaction, in furnishing, in the apartments or dwelling-house a man
or woman occupies and in their household implements. It will sustain
far more property than the average working-class man has to-day. Nor
will it prevent savings or accumulations, if men do not choose to
expend their earnings--nor need it interfere with lending. How far it
will permit or countenance usury is another question altogether. There
will no doubt remain, after all the work-a-day needs of the world have
been met by a scientific public organization of the general property
in Nature, a great number of businesses and