to get your leather here, and to do
that you would have to bring it by railway and ship to this
country. And here again you would find people without any
desire or intention of helping your project, standing in your
course resolved to make every possible penny out of you on
your way to provide sound boots for every one. You would find
the railway was private property and had an owner or owners;
you would find the ship was private property with an owner or
owners, and that none of these would be satisfied for a moment
with a mere fee adequate to their services. They too would be
resolved to make every penny of profit out of you. If you made
inquiries about the matter, you would probably find the real
owners of railway and ship were companies of shareholders, and
the profit squeezed out of your poor people's boots at this
stage went to fill the pockets of old ladies, at Torquay,
spendthrifts in Paris, well-booted gentlemen in London clubs,
all sorts of glossy people....

"Well, you get the leather to England at last; and now you
want to make it into boots. You take it to a centre of
population, invite workers to come to you, erect sheds and
machinery upon a vacant piece of ground, and start off in a
sort of fury of generous industry, boot-making.... Do you?
There comes along an owner for that vacant piece of ground,
declares it is his property, demands an enormous sum for rent.
And your workers all round you, you find, cannot get house
room until they too have paid rent--every inch of the country
is somebody's property, and a man may not shut his eyes for an
hour without the consent of some owner or other. And the food
your shoe-makers eat, the clothes they wear, have all paid
tribute and profit to land-owners, cart-owners, house-owners,
endless tribute over and above the fair pay for work that has
been done upon them....

"So one might go on. But you begin to see now one set of
reasons at least why every one has not good comfortable boots.
There could be plenty of leather; and there is certainly
plenty of labour and quite enough intelligence in the world to
manage that and a thousand other desirable things. But this
institution of Private Property in land and naturally produced
things, these obstructive claims that prevent you using
ground, or moving material, and