kindest thing to do for his wife and son is to take them with him out of a world which seems to him hopeless. It is a terrible book, and as a picture of the black side of the present economic arrangements of society, is well worth study.
The most interesting pages in it—apart from the roughly humorous descriptions of the gaiety with which these unfortunate, underpaid, and overdriven workers face the misery of their lot—are those in which the idealist worker, Frank Owen, describes to his companions, in answer to their jeering questions, the means by which their lot could be bettered. In the course of one of these orations he gives a detailed and ingenious description of the birth of the Socialistic State (page 334). He begins by dealing with the land, saying that a large part of it may be got back "in the same way as it was taken from us. The ancestors of the present holders obtained possession of it by simply passing Acts of Enclosure; the nation should regain possession of those lands by passing Acts of Resumption." As to the rest of the land, he suggested that the present holders should be allowed to keep it during their lives and that it should then revert to the State "to be used for the benefit of all." The railways,
