s at all familiar with this branch of controversial
literature, probably knows how that distressing case is put. One is
presented with a poor man of inconceivable industry, goodness and
virtue; he has worked, he has saved; at last, for the security of his
old age, he holds a few shares in a business, a "bit of land"
or--perhaps through a building society--house property. Would we--the
Anti-Socialist chokes with emotion--so alter the world as to rob him
of _that_? ... The Anti-Socialist gathers himself together with an
effort and goes on to a still more touching thought ... the widow![13]

[13] "The ethical case for slavery in the Southern States of
America," my friend Mr. Graham Wallas reminds me, "was
largely argued on the instance of the widow 'with a few
strong slaves.'"

Well, I think there are assurances in the previous section to disabuse
the reader's mind a little in this matter. This solicitude for the
Saving Small Man and for the widow and orphan seems to me one of the
least honest of all the anti-Socialist arguments. The man "who has
saved a few pounds," the poor widow woman and her children clinging to
some scrap of freehold are thrust forward to defend the harvest of the
landlord and the financier. Let us look at the facts of the case and
see how this present economic system of ours really does treat the
"stocking" of the poor.

In the first place it does not guarantee to the small investor any
security for his little hoard at all. He comes into the world of
investment ill-informed, credulous or only unintelligently
suspicious--and he is as a class continually and systematically deprived
of his little accumulations. One great financial operation after another
in the modern world, as any well-informed person can witness, eats up
the small investor. Some huge, vastly respectable-looking enterprise is
floated with a capital of so many scores or hundreds of thousands,
divided into so many thousands of ordinary shares, so many five or six
per cent. preference, so much debentures. It begins its career with a
flourish of prosperity, the ordinary shares for a few years pay seven,
eight, ten per cent. The Virtuous Small Man provides for his widow and
his old age by buying this estimable security. Its price clambers to a
premium, and so it passes slowly and steadily from its first speculative
holder into the hands of the investing public. Then comes a slow, quiet,
downward movement, a che