this sort of
identification of a man with the thing he does; this identification
that is so natural and desirable--that this living and legitimate
sense of property will if anything be encouraged and its claims
strengthened under Socialism. To-day that particularly living sort of
property-sense is often altogether disregarded. Every day one hears of
men who have worked up departments in businesses, men who have created
values for employers, men who have put their lives into an industrial
machine, being flung aside because their usefulness is over, or out of
personal pique, or to make way for favourites, for the employer's son
or cousin or what not, without any sort of appeal or compensation.
Ownership is autocracy; at the best it is latent injustice in all such
matters of employment.

Then again, consider the case of the artist and the inventor who are
too often forced by poverty now to sell their early inventions for the
barest immediate subsistence. Speculators secure these initial
efforts--sometimes to find them worthless, sometimes to discover in
them the sources of enormous wealth. In no matter is it more difficult
to estimate value than in the case of creative work; few geniuses are
immediately recognized, and the history of art, literature and
invention is full of Chattertons and Savages who perished before
recognition came, and of Dickenses who sold themselves unwisely.
Consider the immense social benefit if the creator even now possessed
an inalienable right to share in the appreciation of his work. Under
Socialism it would for all his life be his--and the world's, and
controllable by him. He would be free to add, to modify, to repeat.

In all these respects modern Socialism tends to create and confirm
property and rights, the property of the user, the rights of the
creator. It is quite other property it tends to destroy; the property,
the claim, of the creditor, the mortgagee, the landlord, and usurer,
the forestaller, gambling speculator, monopolizer and absentee.... In
very truth Socialism would destroy no property at all, but only that
sham property that, like some wizard-cast illusion, robs us all.

Sec. 3.

And now we are discussing the Socialist attitude towards property, it
may be well to consider a little group of objections that are often
made in anti-Socialist tracts. I refer more particularly to a certain
hard case, the hard case of the Savings of the Virtuous Small Man.

The reader, if he i