When the mass of men are dispossessed - own nothing - they become wholly dependent upon the owners; and when those owners are in active competition to lower the cost of production the mass of men whom they exploit not only lack the power to order their own lives, but suffer from want and insecurity as well.

Child! do not throw this book about Refrain from the unholy pleasure Of cutting all the pictures out! Preserve it as your chiefest treasure.

But though Usury is in itself immoral, and justly condemned by every ethical code, its chief and worst defect in the particular case we are now examining, the growth of Capitalism and its increasing proletariat, is the centralization of irresponsible control over the lives of men: the putting power over the proletariat into the hands of a few who can direct the loans of currency and credit without which that proletariat could not be fed and clothed and maintained in work.

Ownership by delegation is a contradiction in terms. When men say, for instance (by a false metaphor), that each member of the public should feel himself an owner of public property-such as a Town Park-and should therefore respect it as his own, they are saying something which all our experience proves to be completely false. No man feels of public property that it is his own; no man will treat it with the care of the affection of a thing which is his own.

Slowly but certainly the proletarian, by every political reform which secures his well-being under new rules of insurance, of State control in education, of State medicine and the rest, is developing into the slave, leaving the rich man apart and free. All industrial civilization is clearly moving towards the re-establishment of the Servile State.

The choice lies between property on the one hand and slavery, public or private, on the other. There is no third issue.

These are the advantages of travel, that one meets so many men whom one would otherwise never meet, and that one feeds as it were upon the complexity of mankind