d into a few hands.
All through the trades and professions and sciences and all over the
world the big eats up the small, the new enlarged scale replaces the
old.

And this is equally true, though it is only now beginning to be
recognized, of the securities of that other section of the middle
class, the section which lives upon invested money. There, too, big
eats little. There, too, the small man is more and more manifestly at
the mercy of the large organization. It was a pleasant illusion of the
Victorian time that one put one's hundred pounds or thousand pounds
"into something," beside the rich man's tens of thousands, and drew
one's secure and satisfying dividends. The intelligent reader of Mr.
Lawson's _Frenzied Finance_ or of the bankruptcy proceedings of Mr.
Hooley realizes this idyll is scarcely true to nature. Through the
seas and shallows of investment flow great tides and depressions, on
which the big fortunes ride to harbour while the little accumulations,
capsized and swamped, quiver down to the bottom. It becomes more and
more true that the small man saves his money for the rich man's
pocket. Only by drastic State intervention is a certain measure of
safety secured for insurance, and in America recently we have had the
spectacle of the people's insurance-money used as a till by the rich
financiers.

And when the middle-class man turns in his desperation from the
advance of the big competitor who is consuming him, as a big codfish
eats its little brother, to the State, he meets a tax-paper; he sees
as the State's most immediate aspect the rate-collector and inexorable
demands. The burthen of taxation certainly falls upon him, and it
falls upon him because he is collectively the weakest class that
possesses any property to be taxed. Below him are classes either too
poor to tax or too politically effective to stand taxation. Above him
is the class which owns a large part of the property in the world; but
it also owns the newspapers and periodicals that are necessary for an
adequate discussion of social justice, and it finds it cheaper to pay
a voluntary tax to the hoardings at election time than to take over
the small man's burdens. He rolls about between these two parties,
antagonized first to one and then the other, and altogether helpless
and ineffectual. So the millstones grind, and so it would seem they
will continue to grind until there is nothing between them; until
organized property in the hands o