energies to the provision of income for the owners of a vast and ever-growing body of immortalized property rights and interests.
Men look with pretended aversion toward the Feudal System—an organization of society under which the nobility and the priestcraft, through the control of the natural resources (agricultural land) were able to live upon the efforts of the great mass of the people. Is it not time to turn from the perspective of history to the realities of the present day economic organizations? Here, in the twentieth century, civilization of the Western World is an economic system which automatically turns into the coffers of those who control the natural resources (forests, ore, coal, fertile land) an endless stream of wealth. As rent ate up the fruits of a man's energy, under feudalism, interest and dividends do likewise under the modern system of industrialism, which has given to income-yielding property a permanence that rivals that estate held by the mediæval landlord.
There is one further feature of the property income situation which cannot be dismissed without a word of comment—that is the tendency of property income to concentrate in the hands of a small group of the population. The tendency is revealed by the record of wealth distribution in every society about which history contains a page. It is present, no one can say with what impetus, in the United States today.
The present system of property ownership places no limitations on the amount of income-yielding property which one individual may control. The Rockefellers, Guggenheims and Carnegies may secure title to a hundred-thousand, a hundred-million, or a hundred-billion estate. There is nothing in the custom or law of the land to check such a procedure, and in the course of the undertaking, business practice affords every conceivable advantage. The modern property-owning world is organized on the assumption that every man has a right to as much property as he can get. Under the circumstances, it is
