et ventes_? They are similar in their origin and similar in
being a tax levied on each increment of wealth which labor produces.
How do urban ground-rents differ from the payments which were made to
English sinecurists before the Reform Bill of 1832? They are equally
tribute paid by those who work to those who do not. If the monopoly
profits of the owner of _banalites_, whose tenant must grind corn at
his mill and make wine at his press, were an intolerable oppression,
what is the sanctity attaching to the monopoly profits of the
capitalists, who, as the Report of the Government Committee on trusts
tells us, "in soap, tobacco, wallpaper, salt, cement and in the textile
trades ... are in a position to control output and prices" or, in other
words, can compel the consumer to buy from them, at the figure they
fix, on pain of not buying at all?

All these rights--royalties, ground-rents, monopoly profits--are
"Property." The criticism most fatal to them is not that of
Socialists. It is contained in the {70} arguments by which property is
usually defended. For if the meaning of the institution is to
encourage industry by securing that the worker shall receive the
produce of his toil, then precisely in proportion as it is important to
preserve the property which a man has in the results of his own
efforts, is it important to abolish that which he has in the results of
the efforts of some one else. The considerations which justify
ownership as a function are those which condemn it as a tax. Property
is not theft, but a good deal of theft becomes property. The owner of
royalties who, when asked why he should be paid L50,000 a year from
minerals which he has neither discovered nor developed nor worked but
only owned, replies "But it's Property!" may feel all the awe which his
language suggests. But in reality he is behaving like the snake which
sinks into its background by pretending that it is the dead branch of a
tree, or the lunatic who tried to catch rabbits by sitting behind a
hedge and making a noise like a turnip. He is practising
protective--and sometimes aggressive--mimicry. His sentiments about
property are those of the simple toiler who fears that what he has sown
another may reap. His claim is to be allowed to continue to reap what
another has sown.

It is sometimes suggested that the less attractive characteristics of
our industrial civilization, its combination of luxury and squalor, its
class divis