whether they outweigh the advantages that arise from it.
The desire to possess is a strong stimulus to activity in production,
because possession is the mark of success in it, and all healthy-minded
men like to feel that they have succeeded; and almost equally strong is
the desire to hand on to children or heirs the possessions that the
worker's energy has got for him. In fact it may almost be said that in
most men's minds the motive of possession implies that of being able to
hand on; they would not feel that they owned property which they were
bound to surrender to the State at their deaths. If and when society is
ever so organized that it can produce what it needs without spurring the
citizen to work with the inducement supplied by possession, and the
power to hand on property, then it may be possible to abolish the
inequities that hereditary property carries with it. As things are at
present arranged it seems that we are bound to put up with them if the
community is to be fed and kept alive. At least we can console ourselves
with the thought that property does not come into existence by magic.
Except in the case of the owners of land who may be enriched without any
effort by the discovery of minerals or by the growth of a city, capital
can only have been created by services rendered; and even in the case of
owners of land, they, and those from whom they derived it, must have
done something in order to get the land.

It is, of course, quite possible that the something which was done was a
service which would not now be looked on as meriting reward. In the
medieval days mailclad robbers used to get (quite honestly and rightly
according to the notions then current) large grants of land because they
had ridden by the side of their feudal chiefs when they went on
marauding forays. In later times, as in the days of our Merry Monarch,
attractive ladies were able to found ducal families by placing their
charms at the service of a royal debauchee. But the rewards of the
freebooters have in almost all cases long ago passed into the hands of
those who purchased them with the proceeds of effort with some approach
to economic justification; and though some of Charles the Second's
dukedoms are still extant, it will hardly be contended that it is
possible to trace the origin of everybody's property and confiscate any
that cannot show a reasonable title, granted for some true economic
service.

What we can do, and ought to do, if