garden
close, in the musical instruments and books and pleasant home-like
things. Now, in nine cases out of ten, we do in effect bundle the
widow out; she remains nominally owner of the former home, but she has
to let it furnished or sell it, to go and live in a boarding-house or
an exiguous flat.

Even perhaps a proportion of accumulated money may reasonably go to
friend or kin. It is a question of public utility; Socialism has done
with absolute propositions in all such things, and views these
problems now as questions of detail, matters for fine discriminations.
We want to be quit of pedantry. All that property which is an
enlargement of personality, the modern Socialist seeks to preserve; it
is that exaggerated property that gives power over the food and needs
of one's fellow-creatures, property and inheritance in land, in
industrial machinery, in the homes of others and in the usurer's grip
upon others, that he seeks to destroy. The more doctrinaire Socialists
will tell you they do not object to property for use and consumption,
but only to property in "the means of production," but I do not choose
to resort to over-precise definitions. The general intention is clear
enough, the particular instance requires particular application. But
it is just because we modern Socialists want every one to have play
for choice and individual expression in all these realities of
property that we object to this monstrous property of a comparatively
small body of individuals expropriating the world.

Sec. 2.

I am inclined to think--but here I speak beyond the text of
contemporary Socialist literature--that in certain directions
Socialism, while destroying property, will introduce a compensatory
element by creating rights. For example, Socialism will certainly
destroy all private property in land and in natural material and
accumulated industrial resources; it will be the universal landlord
and the universal capitalist, but that does not mean that we shall all
be the State's tenants-at-will. There can be little doubt that the
Socialist State will recognize the rights of the improving occupier
and the beneficial hirer. It is manifestly in accordance both with
justice and public policy that a man who takes a piece of land and
creates a value on it--by making a vineyard, let us say--is entitled
to security of tenure, is to be dispossessed only in exceptional
circumstances and with ample atonement. If a man who takes an
agricult