small minority of the
population, the world is to be governed for the advantages of those who
own, it is only incidentally and by accident that the results will be
agreeable to those who work. In practice there is a constant collision
between them. Turned into another channel, half the wealth distributed
in dividends to functionless shareholders, could secure every child a
good education up to 18, could re-endow English Universities, and
(since more efficient production is {80} important) could equip English
industries for more efficient production. Half the ingenuity now
applied to the protection of property could have made most industrial
diseases as rare as smallpox, and most English cities into places of
health and even of beauty. What stands in the way is the doctrine that
the rights of property are absolute, irrespective of any social
function which its owners may perform. So the laws which are most
stringently enforced are still the laws which protect property, though
the protection of property is no longer likely to be equivalent to the
protection of work, and the interests which govern industry and
predominate in public affairs are proprietary interests. A mill-owner
may poison or mangle a generation of operatives; but his brother
magistrates will let him off with a caution or a nominal fine to poison
and mangle the next. For he is an owner of property. A landowner may
draw rents from slums in which young children die at the rate of 200
per 1000; but he will be none the less welcome in polite society. For
property has no obligations and therefore can do no wrong. Urban land
may be held from the market on the outskirts of cities in which human
beings are living three to a room, and rural land may be used for sport
when villagers are leaving it to overcrowd them still more. No public
authority intervenes, for both are property. To those who believe that
institutions which repudiate all moral significance must sooner or
later collapse, a society which confuses the protection of property
with the preservation of its functionless perversions will appear as
precarious as that which has left the memorials of its {81} tasteless
frivolity and more tasteless ostentation in the gardens of Versailles.

Do men love peace? They will see the greatest enemy of social unity in
rights which involve no obligation to co-operate for the service of
society. Do they value equality? Property rights which dispense their