the apartments? no magnificent bedstead in the bedroom? And when he sat down to lunch, would there be no elegant service on the table, no cut-glass, no silver-plate, no shining cutlery, not even electro spoons or coffee-pot? Mr. Blatchford, all these are luxuries. Their use comes from a law of nature. You cannot fight against nature. Luxury is the natural indulgence of taste, out of respect either for yourself or your neighbour; and it will find gratification wherever the means exist. Its prohibition could only be enforced where arbitrary power existed; and such power could not exist in a Socialist Republic.

It is a mistake to blame the rich for indulging in luxury. It is what you and every Socialist would do if you had the chance. Contend, if you like (though it is a vain contention, as we have seen), that the rich have no right to the possession of money; but you cannot, as a reasonable man, object to their using the money as they like while they have it. And do admit that while the present system lasts, the purchase of luxuries by the rich provides employment for the working people. It cannot be contradicted. The question is not how things would work if another system were established, but how is it with things as they are. On this there cannot be two opinions. Of course, the Duke of Argyle is right for the time being-that if the rich were not to spend their money the money would lie idle, and thousands of working people would starve who now find remunerative employment.

To contend that it is the indulgence in luxury by the rich that is the cause of poverty in the people is really to do injustice to your own evident powers of penetration, Mr. Blatchford. Your own other argument is that it is not the spending of money by the rich that is the cause of the present evil, but the existence of a system that permits them to have money to spend. This is another thing. You are only partly right here; but still there is a semblance of sense in it which there is not in the other argument. You blame the rich for a system which they are no more responsible for than you are. They have the money and they spend it; and this is what every man in the same position would do, and what every Socialist would do if he could get the money to-morrow. And in doing so, they would provide occupation for the people under existing circumstances.

As for the system that allows them to have the money, are you going to alter it? How? You say you are not going to seize the wealth from those who now have it. Are you going to take it over under compensation? How is this going to improve things? You would only hand them back their wealth in another form, and continue the existence of the classes in the midst of the Socialist Republic. Are you going to play a trick? Are you going to give them money in compensation, and then enact a law forbidding them to spend the money in the country, and thus deprive the money of all value and make the compensation a mockery? Or are you going to force them to leave the country with their money, and impoverish England to the advantage of other nations?

You see, Mr. Blatchford, the problem bristles with difficulties. The more you think of them the tougher they seem. You have an insoluble problem in hand. I could understand Socialism as a proposal for the seizure and re-distribution of property and the construction of a new system, without reference to present individual rights; but I cannot understand it as a proposal to take over the national industries at a valuation, with the expectation of working them at a profit, while handing over the profit to the old holders in a new form.

No doubt luxury is carried to a scandalous extravagance, and the contrast between the lavish opulence of the rich and the squalor and want of the poor is shocking and painful in the extreme; but you cannot prevent it so long as the rich are allowed to possess money. It is impossible that you can dictate to men of money how much they are to spend, and in what way. A man's purse alone must be the measure of his expenditure. If you are going to interfere with the management of a man's own purse, farewell to liberty.

You would like the capitalists to leave the country, but you say you would like them to leave their property behind them. Here you are again-knocking your head against the sharp corners of your problem. How can you hope that the capitalists will leave the country? Would they leave of their own accord? You know better. Would you drive them out penniless, like the nobles of France a hundred years ago? What, then, about your declaration that you do not propose to seize their property? To drive them out of the country and " nationalize" their property would be ing it most effectually.

To buy it from them would saddle the Socialist Republic (supposing it established) with a debt that would sink it at the start. To compensate them would have the same effect. You would create a class-an "idle" class-in the country; or else you have to perpetrate the atrocious folly and injustice of turning out of the country its most valuable citizens for no other crime than the crime of possessing what the State had given them.

Mr. Blatchford, you have hold of an impracticable scheme-an unsettleable question, a problem you cannot solve. The attempt to solve it must either end in goading the people into acts of violence against the existing order; or in filling them with dangerous anger and disappointment against the mistaken leaders that have lured them on a false hue and cry.

Your increasingly anxious friend,

JOHN SMITH.

Loafers, Artizans, Peers,
and Delicacies.

My Dear Mr. Blatchford,

You

OU deal with quite a cluster of difficulties in your 24th letter. If you do not deal with them successfully,—if, after you have most adroitly pitched them out of your path, they come back on you like the boomerang, the fault is in the subject, and not in your handling of it.

You foresee the difficulty of having loafers and idle people under a system that would require everybody to work. You propose to kill them off by starvation. This is simple and effectual certainly; but it would have its drawbacks. You might possibly kill off some who were not loafers. How are you to tell when a man is a loafer? You say that the mere fact of a man begging under a system in which there would be work for all, would be proof that he was a loafer. But there might not always be work for all. It might happen sometimes in a town or village that all the coopering or smithing work was in hand, and that some cooper or smith might turn up who could not find a job. It might be some weeks before there was work for him. Meanwhile he would have no wages coming in; he is not a loafer, but he cannot starve, so he begs.

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Or a man might be unwell and unable to earn his wages, and might be under the necessity of begging. "Oh, but," you say, we would provide for cases of illness.” Aye, but might there not be shamming? Of course there might, and often would, for many men would prefer to skulk if there was no danger of wages being discontinued. How would you do with the shammers? You would look upon them as self-convicted loafers, and kill them off. "Serve them right, too," you

say. Yes, but might not men be suspected of shamming who were really ill? There is no question about it. Men are sometimes ill enough to be unfit for work, when not ill enough to be above suspicion. Suspecting him of shamming, you would refuse him food, and be guilty of murder.

It is easy to say you would "oblige the loafer to work or perish." In the process, you would cause many others to perish -not only by mistakes of the kind suggested, but often by the action of malice. For see what a weapon you would put into the hands of officials having a grudge. They would only have to raise the cry "You are a loafer" to have legal warrant to stop supplies and starve those who did not please them.

The scavenging also you recognise as a difficulty in a Socialist State. Scavenging is not agreeable work, and if men were under no pressure of necessity, they would not choose scavenging. You think you might get over the difficulty by making scavenging hours shorter than any other kind of hours. But suppose the attraction of short hours was not sufficient to overcome the repulsion of nasty work, and there was a deficiency of volunteers, how then? Would you force the citizens? Would you allow the parish official to serve notice on some ex-railway director or bank-manager (say) or some large holder of Socialist State compensation scrip, that he must become a cleaner of drains or a night-soil man ог a street-cleaner, or a chimney-sweep? What would be the right name for the country where any man was exposed to such freaks of officialism?

You rejoice that under Socialism, snobbery would perish and gentility get quickly ready for burial. It is probable that a good many other things would also be ready for burial at the same time. Hearts would break, refinement vanish, and the beauty of English civilisation become a memory of happier days. The life of the country would be thrown back 500 years, and if Socialism outlasted the indignation of outraged liberty, an iron chain would be tied round the chances of recovery. The only hope would be in revolution, in which the forces of enlightenment, assisted by such of the common people as might mourn the departed glory, would rise in irresistible rebellion and sweep away the odious tyranny erected in the name of liberty and plenty.