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Swartbmore Xectuie.

property which is not to be abolished butdemocratised. If property is a " right of man,"then everybody ought to have his share in it,sufficient for freedom, though not necessarilyequal.

The most important item in this respect is thefree access to the land, from which private owner-ship has excluded the majority of the people. Thefree access to the land seems to be a fundamentalright to every human being who is able and willingto cultivate the land by his own hands. The idealof liberty seems to be fully realised only therewhere man owns the house he lives in and theplot of land the house stands on, however smallit may be. That at the same time seems the bestantidote against communism as the dictatorshipof an armed minority. A Silesian miner, up tothat date a wild communist, who was lucky enoughto buy a plot of land under easy conditions, saidto me when I found him a year later ploughinghis land with his own cow : Now, as a communist,I would be my own enemy.

If free competition cannot democratiseproperty, intervention by the State is inevitable,though how much intervention is needed is aquestion for circumstances to decide. In generalpeople in America are satisfied to restore faircompetition, to control natural monopolies, tocurtail artificial monopolies, public opinion provingmore effective for this purpose than State inter-vention. But in the last resort, EuropeanSocialism also, though rejected in America fromfear that it is " uneconomic," claims to be a means