owners of the equipment of industry in the widest sense of the phrase, including land. A few others can do it by appealing to the community's sympathy owing to physical and other inability to work. Most of us have to work, and to please others by so doing. If we lived in a wilderness and worked only for ourselves, we should still have to work, but only to please ourselves. Our control of goods would thereby be very greatly lessened, and would economic freedom, so gained, be really good for us? Is it not better that we should be forced to co-operate in order to enjoy, and to secure a good life for ourselves by helping to provide what others want? Those of us who take this democratic view must be ready to be bludgeoned with examples of the great artist prostituting his brush to boil his pot, and of the poet who starves because an ignorant public does not want the sonnets that the Muses bid him sing. These are special cases of special gifts, and one cannot feel sure that the artist or the poet would fare better at the hands of a Socialist Treasury Committee or of an Academy appointed by the Guildsmen. But for the ordinary workaday goods of life, there seems to be something pleasant and really "social" and sociable in this dependence on
