THIS MISERY OF BOOTS
better claim to it than the land-owner to his, I don't quite see where the honesty of that course comes in. You can only give property for property in buying and selling; and if private property is not robbery, then not only Socialism but ordinary taxation must be. But if taxation is a justifiable proceeding, if you can tax me (as I am taxed) for public services, a shilling and more out of every twenty shillings I earn, then I do not see why you should not put a tax upon the land-owner if you want to do so, of a half or two-thirds or all his land, or upon the railway shareholder of ten or fifteen or twenty shillings in the pound on his shares. In every change some one has to bear the brunt; every improvement in machinery and industrial organisation deprives some poor people of an income; and I do not see why we should be so extraordinarily tender to the rich, to those who have been unproductive all their lives, when they stand in the way of the general happiness. And though I deny the right to compensation I do not deny its probable advisability. So far as the question of method goes it is quite conceivable that we may partially compensate the property-owners and make all sorts of mitigating arrangements to avoid cruelty to them in our attempt to end the wider cruelties of to-day.
But, apart from the justice of the case, many people seem to regard Socialism as a hopeless dream, because, as they put it, "it is against human nature." Every one with any scrap of property in land, or shares, or what not, they tell us, will be bitterly opposed to the coming of Socialism; and, as such people
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