un a rose garden or grow chrysanthemums, the State will be quite
ready for you to pay it an insurance premium in order that you may
receive in due course an extra annuity to serve that end you
contemplate.

You will probably live as a tenant in a house which may either stand
alone or be part of a terrace or collegiate building, but instead of
having a private landlord, exacting of rent and reluctant of repairs,
your house landlord will very probably be, and your ground landlord
will certainly be, the municipality, the great Birmingham or London or
Hampshire or Glasgow or such-like municipality; and your house will be
built solidly and prettily instead of being jerry-built and
mean-looking, and it will have bathroom, electric light, electrically
equipped kitchen and so forth, as every modern civilized house might
have and should have now. If your taste runs to a little close garden
of your own, you will probably find plenty of houses with one; if that
is not so, and you want it badly, you will get other people of like
tastes to petition the municipality to provide some, and if that will
not do, you will put yourself up as a candidate for the parish or
municipal council to bring this about. You will pay very much the sort
of rent you pay now, but you will not pay it to a private landlord to
spend as he likes at Monte Carlo or upon foreign missions or in
financing "Moderate" bill-posting or what not, but to the
municipality, and you will pay no rates at all. The rent will do under
Socialism what the rates do now. You cannot grasp too clearly that
_Socialism will abolish rates_ absolutely. Rates for public purposes
are necessary to-day because the landowners of the world evade the
public obligations that should, in common sense, go with the rent.

Light, heating, water and so on will either be covered by the rent or
charged for separately, and they will be supplied just as near
cost-price as possible. I don't think you will buy coals, because I
think that in a few years' time it will be possible to heat every
house adequately by electricity; but if I am wrong in that, then you
will buy your coals just as you do now, except that you will have an
honest coal merchant, the Public Coal Service, a merchant not greedy
for profit nor short in the weight, calculating and foreseeing your
needs, not that it may profit by them but in order to serve them,
storing coal against a demand and so never raising the price in
winter.

I am