this I would reply that the depletion of public
resources is a symptom of profound economic disorganization. Wealth, I
would contend, has a social as well as a personal basis. Some forms of
wealth, such as ground rents in and about cities, are substantially the
creation of society, and it is only through the misfeasance of
government in times past that such wealth has been allowed to fall into
private hands. Other great sources of wealth are found in financial and
speculative operations, often of distinctly anti-social tendency and
possible only through the defective organization of our economy. Other
causes rest in the partial monopolies which our liquor laws, on the one
side, and the old practice of allowing the supply of municipal services
to fall into private hands have built up. Through the principle of
inheritance, property so accumulated is handed on; and the result is
that while there is a small class born to the inheritance of a share in
the material benefits of civilization, there is a far larger class which
can say "naked we enter, naked we leave." This system, as a whole, it
is maintained, requires revision. Property in this condition of things
ceases, it is urged, to be essentially an institution by which each man
can secure to himself the fruits of his own labour, and becomes an
instrument whereby the owner can command the labour of others on terms
which he is in general able to dictate. This tendency is held to be
undesirable, and to be capable of a remedy through a concerted series of
fiscal, industrial, and social measures which would have the effect of
augmenting the common stock at the disposal of society, and so applying
it as to secure the economic independence of all who do not forfeit
their advantages by idleness, incapacity, or crime. There are early
forms of communal society in which each person is born to his
appropriate status, carrying its appropriate share of the common land.
In destroying the last relics of this system economic individualism has
laid the basis of great material advances, but at great cost to the
happiness of the masses. The ground problem in economics is not to
destroy property, but to restore the social conception of property to
its right place under conditions suitable to modern needs. This is not
to be done by crude measures of redistribution, such as those of which
we hear in ancient history. It is to be done by distinguishing the
social from the individual factors in we