most dreadful catastrophe human society could experience. For what
sort of provisional government should we have in that confusion?

Expropriation must be a gradual process, a process of economic and
political readjustment, accompanied at every step by an explanatory
educational advance. There is no reason why a cultivated property
owner should not welcome and hasten its coming. Modern Socialism is
prepared to compensate him, not perhaps "fully" but reasonably, for
his renunciations and to avail itself of his help, to relieve him of
his administrative duties, his excess of responsibility for estate and
business. It does not grudge him a compensating annuity nor
terminating rights of user. It has no intention of obliterating him
nor the things he cares for. It wants not only to socialize his
possessions, but to socialize his achievement in culture and all that
leisure has taught him of the possibilities of life. It wants all men
to become as fine as he. Its enemy is not the rich man but the
aggressive rich man, the usurer, the sweater, the giant plunderer, who
are developing the latent evil of riches. It repudiates altogether the
conception of a bitter class-war between those who Have and those who
Have Not.

But this new tolerant spirit in method involves no weakening of the
ultimate conception. Modern Socialism sets itself absolutely against
the creation of new private property out of land, or rights or
concessions not yet assigned. All new great monopolistic enterprises
in transit, building and cultivation, for example, must from the first
be under public ownership. And the chief work of social statesmanship,
the secular process of government, must be the steady, orderly
resumption by the community, without violence and without delay, of
the land, of the apparatus of transit, of communication, of food
distribution and of all the great common services of mankind, and the
care and training of a new generation in their collective use and in
more civilized conceptions of living.

CHAPTER VIII

THE MIDDLE-CLASS MAN, THE BUSINESS MAN, AND SOCIALISM

Sec. 1.

Let me insert here a few remarks upon a question that arises naturally
out of the preceding discussion, and that is the future of that
miscellaneous section of the community known as the middle class. It
is one that I happen to know with a peculiar intimacy.

For a century or more the grinding out of the middle class has been
going on. I began to find i