Under the old philosophy which had governed the high Middle Ages things had been everywhere towards a condition of Society in which property was well distributed throughout the community, and thus the family rendered independent.

The Reformation has been called in a biting epigram "a rising of the rich against the poor."

Physicians of the utmost fame, Were called at once; but when they came They answered, as they took their fees, 'There is no Cure for this Disease.'

There is already something like a Jewish monopoly in high finance... here is the same element of Jewish monopoly in the silver trade, and in the control of various other metals, notably lead, nickel, quicksilver. What is most disquieting of all, this tendency to monopoly is spreading like a disease.

When the mass of families in a State are without property, then those who were once citizens become virtually slaves. The more the State steps in to enforce conditions of security and sufficiency; the more it regulates wages, provides compulsory insurance, doctoring, education, and in general takes over the lives of the wage-earners, for the benefit of the companies and men employing the wage-earners, the more is this condition of semi-slavery accentuated.

The restoration of property would be a complicated, arduous and presumably a lengthy business; the transformation of a Capitalist Society into a Communist one needs nothing but the extension of existing conditions.

There are few greater temptations on earth than to stay permanently at Oxford in meditation, and to read all the books in the Bodlean.