aintenance of a leisure class at
the public expense.

"Possession," said the Egoist, "without obligation to the object
possessed, approaches felicity." Functionless property appears natural
to those who believe that society should be organized for the
acquisition of private wealth, and attacks upon it perverse or
malicious, because the question which they ask of any institution is,
"What does it yield?" And such property yields much {77} to those who
own it. Those, however, who hold that social unity and effective work
are possible only if society is organized and wealth distributed on the
basis of function, will ask of an institution, not, "What dividends
does it pay?" but "What service does it perform?" To them the fact
that much property yields income irrespective of any service which is
performed or obligation which is recognized by its owners will appear
not a quality but a vice. They will see in the social confusion which
it produces, payments disproportionate to service here, and payments
without any service at all there, and dissatisfaction everywhere, a
convincing confirmation of their argument that to build on a foundation
of rights and of rights alone is to build on a quicksand.

From the portentous exaggeration into an absolute of what once was, and
still might be, a sane and social institution most other social evils
follow the power of those who do not work over those who do, the
alternate subservience and rebelliousness of those who work towards
those who do not, the starving of science and thought and creative
effort for fear that expenditure upon them should impinge on the
comfort of the sluggard and the _faineant_, and the arrangement of
society in most of its subsidiary activities to suit the convenience
not of those who work usefully but of those who spend gaily, so that
the most hideous, desolate and parsimonious places in the country are
those in which the greatest wealth is produced, the Clyde valley, or
the cotton towns of Lancashire, or the mining villages of Scotland and
Wales, and the gayest and most luxurious {78} those in which it is
consumed. From the point of view of social health and economic
efficiency, society should obtain its material equipment at the
cheapest price possible, and after providing for depreciation and
expansion should distribute the whole product to its working members
and their dependents. What happens at present, however, is that its
workers are hired at the