I
In the foregoing chapters I have intimated that every phase of the question of freedom for women is bound up with the larger question of human freedom. If it is freedom that women want, they can not be content to be legally equal with men; but having gained this equality they must carry on their struggle against the oppressions which privilege exercises upon humanity at large by virtue of an usurped economic power. All human beings, presumably, would gain by freedom; but women particularly stand to gain by it, for as I have shown, they are victims of special prepossessions which mere legal equality with men may hardly be expected to affect.
If, on the other hand, it is dominance that they desire, they might, indeed, conceivably attain this without freedom; but one can not see much encouragement for that wish in the present trend of affairs. Before women could dominate, they would not only have to overcome the prejudices, superstitions, and legal disabilities which have contributed to their subjection; but they would also have to get the upper hand of men economically. They would have to manœuvre themselves into that advantage in opportunity which men at present enjoy. One can hardly see how this could be brought about except by some kind of coup d’état, for the tendency of modern legislation, as I have shown, far from being calculated to enlarge the scope of women’s economic activity, is likely rather to narrow it; nor is it entirely probable that the establishment of mere legal equality would count for much in the premises, for the courts may always decide that any legislation designed for the Larger Good is valid even though it may clash with the principle of equal rights.[30] Suppose, however, that the momentum gathered by the woman’s movement should carry society through a period of sex-equality and bring it out on the other side—the side of female domination—then men and women would simply have exchanged places, and the social evils which now afflict mankind would remain, mutatis mutandis. Women would be more nearly free than men, as men are now more nearly free than women; but no one would be really free, because real freedom is not a matter of the shifting of advantage from one sex to the other or from one class to another. Real freedom means the disappearance of advantage, and primarily of economic advantage. It can not be too often repeated that political and social freedom are unattainable unless and until economic freedom has been attained—but this is not a concern of either sex or class. In order to live, women, like men, must eat; to eat, they, like men, must labour; to labour, they, like men, must have opportunity. Control of men’s and women’s economic opportunity, therefore, means control of their livelihood, and control of men’s and women’s livelihood means control of men and women. Real freedom, therefore, does not come in sight of either men or women until this control is abated; that is to say, until (speaking in technical terms) the two active factors in production, capital and labour, which are pro tanto sexless, have free access to the passive factor, natural resources—in other words, until the private monopoly of natural resources is dissolved.
If the struggle of women to rid themselves of their peculiar disabilities were to turn out into an attempt to dominate men as men have for so long dominated women, one could perfectly understand the psychology behind such an attempt. With the exception of a few individuals, humankind has thus far achieved no very high idea of freedom. The ambition of subject classes has never gone much beyond the desire to enjoy the privileges usurped by their masters. They have resented being dominated, but not domination; they have had no repugnance to the thought of dominating others. Their psychology was very well summed up by Punch, in the remark of one old market-woman to another (I quote from memory): “You see, Mrs. ——, when we have a Labour Government we’ll all be equal, and then I shall have a servant to do my work for me.” It is because of this myopic view of the nature of freedom that all revolutions have been mere scrambles for advantage, and have accomplished nothing more than a shifting of power from one class to another, or as John Adams said, “a mere change of impostors.” If the woman’s movement should resolve itself into a similar scramble, it would be unfortunate but not surprising, for women may hardly be expected to rise at once above the retaliatory spirit which is one of the common curses of humanity.
They would have good ex parte arguments ready to their tongue; many an argument, indeed, which has been advanced to defend their subjection might be effectively turned around. Their part in parenthood for example, has long been held to justify their subjection under the guise of protection in this function. It would be equally logical to argue that women, as mothers of the race, should dominate the family because, as givers of life, they have a deeper personal interest and a greater natural right in their children than men have. It might be argued that they should control all public affairs because of the greater understanding of the value of human life and deeper interest in the welfare of humanity that motherhood brings. One often hears the argument—which no amount of female bloodthirst in time of war ever seems to make effectively ridiculous—that if women were in power there would be no wars, because they, knowing the cost of giving life, would not consent to its wilful wholesale destruction. The doctrine that women are closer to the race than men is really dangerous to those who now preach it; for it affords the best kind of basis for the contention that women should dominate in all matters concerning the race—and all human affairs may be held to concern the race in one way or another.
Perhaps the best argument for the domination of women is that if society, like parliamentary government, must for ever contemplate a mere sterile succession of outs and ins, it is time that women had their innings. But the analogy with the parliamentary system goes further. Public faith in the parliamentary principle has waned almost to the disappearing-point, and the system has suffered wholesale discredit, because it became slowly but surely evident that what actually kept them up was “the cohesive power of public plunder.” If women took what might be called by analogy the political view of their right to their innings, and let it animate them in a scuffle for predominance, the general reaction would be similar. In a matter of this kind, great numbers of people would be found objective enough to glance at such an effort and pass it by in disapproval of the waste of energy involved in bringing about a readjustment that promised nothing better than a shifting of the incidence of injustice. Women would thus forfeit a great deal of sympathy, and at the same time probably create even more antagonism than they have thus far had to face. They would place themselves in a position similar to that of organized labour, which is so intent on contending for what it conceives to be its own interest—a position of advantage in bargaining on wages and conditions of labour—that by the narrowness of its policy it antagonizes a great deal of public sentiment which must inevitably be enlisted on its behalf if it undertook to contend for the general interest, in which its own is included, and in the service of which its own is bound, in the long run, to be best served.
What the nature of this general interest is, I have already intimated. It is economic, and it can be advanced only through the establishment of an order of society in which every human being shall enjoy the natural right to labour and to enjoy all that his labour produces. It is upon mankind’s security in this right that human freedom, in whatever mode or aspect—social, philosophical, political, religious—primarily depends.
The right to labour and to enjoy the fruits of one’s labour means only the right of free access to the source of subsistence, which is land.[31] If access to that source may be arbitrarily denied, the right to labour is denied, and the opportunity to get one’s living becomes a privilege which may be withheld or granted as suits the need or convenience of the person who bestows it, and wholly on his own terms. If access may be had only on the payment of tribute, the condition abrogates the right to enjoy the fruit of one’s labour, for the tribute consumes a share of it.
While access to land is free, no one need know want; for he may always get his living by applying his labour to natural resources “on his own.” He may always, that is, work for himself instead of depending for his living on the chance to work for an employer. Under such conditions, moreover, no one need content himself, as the labourer is forced to content himself at present, with a small share of what his labour produces, for as Turgot pointed out a century and a half ago, he can always demand of an employer the full equivalent of what he could earn by working for himself. It is clear that under such an economic system, the share of the capitalist in any product would amount only to a fair competitive return on his actual investment. Under the present system the capitalist often enjoys both directly and indirectly the advantage of monopoly, which enables him to appropriate an unfair proportion of his workers’ labour-product. He is a direct beneficiary of monopoly when he holds legal title to the source of his product—cultivable land, mines, forests, water-power—or where he holds franchises or profits by protective tariffs or embargoes. He is an indirect beneficiary when he profits by the competition for work among workers whom monopoly has deprived of free access to land. The steel-trust, as I have remarked, is a striking example of a capitalist organization which benefits both directly and indirectly by monopoly. On the one hand, it monopolizes and holds out of access vast mining-properties, and monopolizes the home market through a protective tariff. On the other, it levies tribute on labour by virtue of the scarcity of opportunity created by monopoly in general.
Another excellent instance of this dual advantage is furnished by the railways of this country. Not only have they received governmental land-grants worth enough to cover their construction-costs many times over, but they hold a valuable franchise-monopoly in the exclusive right to do business over a long continuous strip of land called their “right of way”; by means of which monopoly they drain the commerce of a vast area as a river drains its waters. Through the enormous wealth which these monopolies have enabled them to accumulate, they have been able to influence governmental policy in ways designed to enhance their privileges; for example, they have been able to curtail water-transportation and thus reduce competition. They have profited by tariffs, as through the emergency-law some years ago, which raised the tariff on wheat just enough to cover the difference between the cost of landing a bushel of wheat from the Argentine at one of our Eastern ports, and the rate for transporting it by railway from our Western wheat-fields. Through the Interstate Commerce Commission, of which they captured control almost as soon as it was formed, they are allowed to levy rates which represent not the cost of transportation but the amount which can be exacted for it. So much for their direct benefit from monopoly. Indirectly they benefit in the same way as any other capitalist, through the opportunity to exploit a labour-surplus created and maintained by monopoly; and while they are somewhat hindered in making the most of this opportunity by the effectiveness of defensive organization among their skilled employees, they have a pretty free hand with their thousands of unskilled workers, and manage on the whole to do very well out of them.
Even where the capitalist is not himself to any significant extent a monopolist, he derives great benefit from monopoly, for it is thanks to the monopolist of natural resources that he is able to keep labourers at, or very near, the margin of subsistence. He is not always, however, undisturbed in the enjoyment of his advantage; for he may be himself quite as much at the mercy of monopoly as the workers he exploits. The tenant-farmer affords an excellent example of this. He is the capitalist in the farming-industry, who pays to the land-monopolist tribute in the form of rent, to the railways tribute in exorbitant freight-rates on his implements and products, to the manufacturers of his implements tribute in the form of tariffs. He furnishes the capital necessary for operating the farm, pays the wages of such labour as he may require, and takes for himself what is left after all these charges have been met, which in this country is so little that it does not suffice to pay him both interest on his capital and wages for his own labour—a condition which explains the steady drift of our population from the farms to the cities, and which also accounts for the extraordinary fact that agriculture, which is in volume our greatest industry is, qua industry, bankrupt. All the money in farming is now, and for some time has been, in the rise of land-values. It is evident, then, that save where capital and monopoly are united, capital as well as labour is victimized by monopoly. This is one of the most important facts of our system, and almost everyone overlooks it. The whole producing organization is levied upon by a power which itself performs no service whatever in return for the wealth that it appropriates; which is, on the contrary, an incubus on the producing organization. To put this statement more clearly, the monopolist, whose control of the sources of production makes his exactions inescapable, is limited in those exactions only by the amount that the traffic will bear. If a condition arises which makes a certain kind of production especially desirable, there will naturally be a pressure of people desiring to undertake that kind of production, and the monopolist who controls its source will exact in payment for access to that source an amount fixed by the number of competitors seeking access. He is thus able to absorb all the returns of the industry which depends on his monopoly, except just so much as is necessary to encourage people to keep on with it. For example, during the war the owners of our Western wheat-lands, who had been demanding one-third of the crop in rent, raised the amount to two-fifths, because at the price fixed by the Government wheat-growing was profitable and there were many would-be producers seeking access to wheat-lands. The same condition was reflected in the selling price of land. Farms were sold and resold at advancing prices until land that had sold before the war for sixty-five dollars an acre was bringing two hundred. During the period of deflation thousands of acres bought on mortgages reverted from one buyer to another until the original owner had back his land plus whatever profit he had had from its sale. All this raising of rents and this buying and selling at inflated prices, did nothing for production, obviously, except to drain off the lion’s share of its proceeds into the pocket of the monopolist; for all speculative values must necessarily be paid finally out of production, since there is no other source for them to come from. The producing organization thus carries an enormous load of people who draw their living from it and give neither goods nor services in return; who live, that is to say, by appropriating the labour-products of others without compensation—in other words, by legalized theft.
As monopoly extends and tightens its grip on the sources of production, it is enabled to exact an increasing share of the proceeds, until the point is reached where industry can no longer meet its demands and continue to pay interest and wages. For example, so long as this country had a frontier, the monopolist was in no position to exact a very great share of production, for the producer had the alternative of pushing on to the margin of cultivation where there were as yet no landlords to support. The monopolist, therefore, could exact no more than the difference between what a man might earn in a sparsely settled country, remote from markets, and what he could earn by carrying on production in a more thickly settled and more nearly monopolized region. So long as this condition endured, production in this country was able to pay tribute to monopoly and still pay the capitalist a fairly good rate of interest and the labourer a fairly good wage. But since the late nineteenth century, when the frontier was closed, all the best of the country’s land and natural resources being legally occupied, monopoly has been able to exact an ever greater share of production; for while monopoly progresses, the population grows, and competitive demand for access to the source of production increases; and these two causes combine to cut down free economic opportunity to the disappearing point. Thus it seems only a matter of time until production will break down under the exactions of monopoly and revolution and readjustment will follow. The breakdown has already begun in the basic industry, agriculture, for, as I have stated above, the tenant farmer is no longer able to meet the charges of monopoly and still earn interest and wages. Therefore our agrarian population, literally starved off the land, is steadily drifting to the cities, to swell the numbers of workers who crowd the industrial labour-market. This is to say that our civilization is dying at the root; and this having presently grown too rotten to nourish it or support it, a little wind of revolution or foreign invasion will one day overturn it, as all civilizations which have hitherto existed have been overturned by the same cause. “Latifundia,” said Pliny, “perdiderunt Romam.”
This same economic system exists in all the great countries of the world save Russia, where it broke down under the Czarist régime and has not been re-established. It is farther advanced in the countries of the old world than it is here, because this country is more recently settled. This fact constitutes the only difference between the economic order in the old world and that in the new—a difference in the degree that exploitation has reached.
Wherever exploitation exists, whether in the new world or the old, it exists by means of a governmental organization which its beneficiaries control and use to protect their privileges against the expropriated and exploited masses. There is general agreement among scholars that in government, exploitation came first, and what we know as law and order are its incidental by-products; and that however far the development of these by-products may go, they are never allowed to interfere with exploitation. “The State,” says Oppenheimer, “grew from the subjugation of one group of men by another. Its basic justification, its raison d’être, was and is the economic exploitation of those subjugated.” Both the origin and the essential nature of the State remain perfectly clear so long as the conquering class remains distinct from the subject classes and keeps these in a state of vassalage, without freedom of movement, and subject to transfer from one owner to another along with the land on which they dwell. In our own age, they are quite evident in the dealings of the Western powers with weak peoples, as in India or the Philippine Islands, or the mandated territories under the League of Nations, where foreign Governments, through their military organizations, protect their nationals in an economic exploitation of the native population, and themselves levy taxes upon the natives to pay the costs of the process. The nature and purpose of the State are clear, indeed, in any community where the owning and exploiting class exercises direct control over the propertyless dependent classes as more or less chattels. The landed aristocracy of Europe formerly exercised this direct control, as their titles, now grown meaningless, indicate.
But where the form of the State has undergone a change which precludes this direct control by the owning class, the nature of the State, and its essential function, are obscured. Under the republicanism which succeeded the American and French revolutions, the expropriated classes have gained freedom of movement, a limited freedom of opinion, and a nominal share in the exercise of government. The peasant is no longer bound to the soil he tills; he may leave it at will to seek his fortune elsewhere—on the terms of another landlord. The owning classes no longer directly exercise government or directly enjoy honours and titles by virtue of ownership. The peoples of the Western world, at least where parliamentarism has not broken down, have a nominal freedom with little of the reality. Nominal freedom of movement is worth little to the man who faces the alternative of being exploited where he is, or being exploited elsewhere. Nominal freedom of opinion is not extremely valuable when expression of opinion may cost one the opportunity to earn one’s living; and the right to vote offers little satisfaction when it means merely a right of choice between rival parties and candidates representing exactly the same system of economic exploitation.
The political revolution which followed the breakdown of feudalism did the world its greatest service in launching the idea of freedom; it did nothing—or relatively very little—for its substance. Through its agency the equal right of all human beings to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” has come to be granted in theory though not in fact; it remained for the Russian Revolution to proclaim the further idea that the basis of this right is not political but economic. The political revolution did more; by establishing political democracy, it put into the hands of the people the power to achieve economic democracy by peaceful means. But by that very act it obscured the essential function of the State and the source of its power, which remained clear as long as those who owned ruled directly by virtue of ownership; and thus it hindered a clear perception of the causal relation between privilege and slavery. By abolishing hereditary power, it effected a redistribution of privilege, and at the same time forced privilege to exercise its control of government by indirect means. Privilege was no longer seated on the throne, but it remained, through its control of economic opportunity, the power behind the throne;[32] a power all the more difficult to dislodge now that it exercised control without assuming responsibility. Republicanism has proved the futility of dislodging a privileged class without abolishing privilege; for this simply prepares the way for the rise of a new privileged class which will use government to enforce its exploitation of the propertyless class, in a different way, perhaps, but quite as effectively as its predecessors.
The psychological effect of the political equality established under republicanism is extremely demoralizing. As I have remarked, the subject classes have never desired freedom so much as a chance at the privileges that they see other people enjoy. Political equality, with its breaking-down of class distinctions, creates an impression of equality of opportunity—and indeed to the extent that government maintains no disabling legal discriminations among members of the enfranchised class,[33] it actually establishes equality. No member of that class is excluded from the benefits of privilege by anything save his inability to get possession of it; and this fact, especially in a country where opportunity is comparatively plentiful, is more likely to confirm people in their loyalty to a system under which they stand even a dog’s chance to become beneficiaries of privilege, than it is to stimulate an endeavour to abolish privilege altogether. In this country the incalculable richness of natural resources and the enormous wealth to be gained by speculative enterprise under a government which gives full rein to monopoly, contributed immensely to the corruption of the citizenry. Speculation became the normal course of enterprise, the most approved method of money-getting; and the more ruinously did the monopolist exploit the country’s resources, as Mr. Veblen has pointed out, the greater the regard in which he was held by his fellow citizens. Never before in the world’s history had so many people a chance at the enjoyment of privilege as in the pioneer period of American development. The country’s resources were gutted for profit, not developed for use. The use-value of land was incidental to its value as real estate. Every farmer became a speculator, and consequently the margin of cultivation, instead of being pushed out gradually in response to the natural increase in the country’s needs, was extended artificially and with extreme rapidity, with the result that farms were miles apart and unnecessary difficulties in marketing, and in the maintenance of education and social life, were created. The country resembled the modern city-addition of the real-estater, with all the framework of settlement, waiting for the pressure of population to enhance the selling-price of land. Not only was the public mind corrupted by the apparently limitless opportunity to enjoy privilege—not only was speculation confused with production—but all this opportunity was blindly attributed to the blessings of republicanism. “The greatest government on earth” came to be regarded as the guardian of free opportunity for all citizens, in spite of the very evident fact that no government which protects land-monopoly can possibly maintain freedom of opportunity, for in the course of monopoly all available natural resources are shortly pre-empted, and those people who are born after occupation is complete will find nothing left to pre-empt. Thus American patriotism took on a religious fervour, and the corruption of the populace was complete.
The rise of industrialism has done as much as anything else to engender misapprehension of the State’s essential nature, its chief function, and the source of its power. It is significant that the Physiocrats lived and observed the workings of the State before the industrial era, in an agricultural country, where the relation between land-monopoly and government was direct and inescapable; and that Karl Marx lived and wrote after the rise of the factory-system, in a highly industrialized country. The Physiocrats, for whom the basic economic problem was unobscured, therefore attributed involuntary poverty to its actual cause; while Marx, confusing capital’s fortuitous advantage from monopoly with monopoly itself, laid the responsibility at the door of capitalism. To be sure, Marx recognized and stated the fact that expropriation must precede exploitation; but he did not draw the obvious conclusion that the way to break capital’s power to exploit the worker is by simple reimpropriation. At present there is a general impression that the factory-system lured the population into the cities, and thus caused the overcrowding that results in scarcity of jobs and inadequacy of wage. As a matter of fact, the factory-system found the cities already overcrowded with exploitable labour. In England, for example, the Enclosures Acts had deprived the people of what common land remained to them, and had driven them into the cities where they lived in inconceivable filth and squalor, eking out a miserable existence under the old family-system of industry. The machine-system found all this expropriated and exploitable human material ready to serve its ends—far more, indeed, than it needed, as the riots among the workers deprived of their livelihood by its labour-saving tools, plainly indicated. The industrial revolution, then, did not produce the overcrowding of the labour-market; but the capitalist of the revolution profited by an overcrowding that already existed. He reaped indirectly the fruits of monopoly. He profited likewise, and profits still, by every labour-saving device, for it enabled him at once to dispense with some labourers and, because of the increase of unemployment thus caused, to pay his remaining workers less. Capital was thus enabled to appropriate much more than its rightful share of production, and hence to amass enormous wealth, by means of which it influenced government on behalf of its own further enrichment. In this country, it has secured a system of protective tariffs which amount to a governmental delegation of taxing-power to the protected industries; it gives them a monopoly of the home-market and enables them to add to the price of their product the amount of the tariff which has been set against the competing foreign article. Capital has found other ways of creating monopolies, such as the combinations in restraint of trade at which the ineffectual Sherman law was levelled. As the exactions of monopoly increase, and the exploitation of labour nears the point of diminishing return, the capitalist-monopolist embarks, with the protection of government, on a policy of economic imperialism. He monopolizes the markets of weak nations at the point of his Government’s bayonets. He invests in foreign enterprises which offer high returns for himself and risk of war for the Government which backs him—that is to say, for the exploited masses at home who must support the Government and furnish its soldiers. In short, he constitutes himself a menace to peace and prosperity both at home and abroad; so that it is not to be wondered at if people observing his sinister activities, take capital to be the cause of the economic injustice from which it derives its power. Yet, if natural resources were put freely in competition with industry for the employment of labour, the inflamed fortunes of the capitalist class would disappear. Monopoly having been abolished,[34] the capitalist-monopolist would no longer exist, and the capitalist would no longer be in a position to exact from production anything more than his rightful interest—that is, as I have said, the amount fixed by free competitive demand for the use of his capital.
There is yet another cause of confusion in the long-established custom of regarding land as private property, whereas it is not, rightly speaking, private property at all, but the source from which property is produced by the combined efforts of labour and capital. The right to property in wealth which has been produced, as, for instance, the coat on one’s back, may be defended on the ground that it is the product of one’s own labour, or has been acquired through exchange of an equivalent amount of one’s own product; but the right to property in land can not be defended on the same ground, because land is not a labour-product. The distinction is simply between labour-made property and law-made property. Under our present system of tenure, to be sure, the purchase price of land—that is, the investment of capital that the owner has made in order to get title—may represent human labour—but this is merely to say that the owner has invested his capital in privilege, or law-made property; that he has purchased, under governmental guarantee, a certain delegation of taxing-power, precisely as the investor in governmental securities purchases a governmental guarantee that a certain share of future labour-products will be taken from the producers and turned over to him. The fact that, under political government, capital may be invested in privilege in no wise alters the iniquitous nature of privilege, and a sound public policy would disallow an investor’s plea of good faith ex post facto.[35] Under a system which did not permit such investments, those people who wished to put their capital to gainful use would invest it in the only legitimate way, which is in productive enterprise.
It is, perhaps, partly because of the confusion of thought produced by all these causes, that no revolution has ever abolished the exploiting State and the privileges that it exists to secure. But it must also be remembered that all revolutions have risen out of factional disputes or class-wars, and that in the latter case, the chief interest of the revolting class has been not to abolish privilege but to redistribute it. The French Revolution, for instance, expropriated the land-owning nobility, but its politicians dared not abolish private land-monopoly, for the bourgeoisie which supported the revolution would not have tolerated such an interference with their own enjoyment of privilege. In one important respect the Russian Revolution is an exception to this rule. It is a class-revolution, but its avowed ultimate purpose is to abolish even that State-organization which itself at present maintains.[36] It is too early for any forecast to be made concerning the outcome of this attempt; but whether it succeeds or not, the Russian Revolution has already performed an inestimable service to the world in proclaiming that the nature of freedom is not political but economic, and in refusing, as a State-organization, to use its power for the maintenance of an idle, rent-consuming class, living by the exploitation of labour at home or in spheres of influence abroad.
In order to abolish privilege it is not necessary, in a political democracy, to wait for the economic breakdown which its exactions inevitably bring about—that is to say, it is not necessary to wait until the number of wasteful idlers that production must support shall become so numerous and so wasteful that it can no longer meet their exactions. The ballot has been a pretty ineffectual weapon in the hands of the rank and file, but—so much must be said for republicanism—it could be made effective. First, however, the rank and file would have to learn what it is that this weapon should be used against—it would have to become aware of the nature of real freedom, and to wish real freedom to prevail. The power of privilege under republicanism depends not only on its control of wealth, but much more upon its control of thought and opinion. That a campaign of education among the voters can seriously endanger the position of privilege was proved in England during the great land-values campaign of 1914, which was cut short by the war. But the task of education is not easy, because of the conditions I have just been discussing, which obscure the essential nature of privilege, and of the State. We have had in this country a great deal of outcry against privilege, and it has aroused considerable popular sympathy; but the zeal engendered thereby has not advanced the cause of freedom, because the outcry was directed against the capitalist and the exploiting power gained by his fortuitous advantage from privilege, but not against privilege itself. The nature of privilege was obscured. It is evidently necessary, then, if the ballot is ever to be successfully employed against privilege, to know what privilege means and to clear away all confusion about it, so that the voters may see what is at fault in our economic system, and what remedial steps are necessary.
The essential nature of freedom has been already shown. It comes out in the abolition of monopoly, primarily monopoly of natural resources, resulting in complete freedom of the individual to apply his productive labour where he will. It is freedom to produce, and its corollary, freedom to exchange—the laissez-faire, laissez-passer of the Physiocrats. How this freedom is to be obtained is not for me to say. I am not a propagandist, nor do I regard the question as at present so important as that of establishing a clear understanding of the nature of freedom. When enough people come to see that the root of all bondage, economic, political, social—even the bondage of superstition and taboo—is expropriation, reimpropriation will not be long in following; and it may be achieved by a method quite different from all those which theorists have thus far devised. When people know what they need, they are usually pretty resourceful about finding means to get it; and so long as they do not know what they need, all the means of securing it that can be suggested, however excellent, must remain ineffective from the lack of sufficient will to use them.