e things such as land or
houses, or is the holding, say, of colonial railway shares sufficient? Is
the absence of unlimited proprietary rights felt more strongly in the
case of personal chattels (such as furniture and ornaments) than in the
case of land or machinery? Does the degree and direction of the instinct
markedly differ among different individuals or races, or between the two
sexes?"

This puts the argument upon a plane where discussion is relevant. This is
no trumped-up issue: it is asked by a politician and a socialist seeking
for a real solution. We need to know whether the "magic of property"
extends from a man's garden to Standard Oil stocks as anti-socialists
say, and, conversely, we need to know what is happening to that mass of
proletarians who own no property and cannot satisfy their instincts even
with personal chattels.

For if ownership is a human need, we certainly cannot taboo it as the
extreme communists so dogmatically urge. "Pending ... an inquiry," writes
Mr. Wallas, "my own provisional opinion is that, like a good many
instincts of very early evolutionary origin, it can be satisfied by an
avowed pretense; just as a kitten which is fed regularly on milk can be
kept in good health if it is allowed to indulge its hunting instinct by
playing with a bobbin, and a peaceful civil servant satisfies his
instinct of combat and adventure at golf."

Mr. Wallas takes exactly the same position as William James did when he
planned a "moral equivalent" for war. Both men illustrate the changing
focus of political thought. Both try to found statesmanship on human
need. Both see that there are good and bad satisfactions of the same
impulse. The routineer with his taboo does not see this, so he attempts
the impossible task of obliterating the impulse. He differs fundamentally
from the creative politician who devotes himself to inventing fine
expressions for human needs, who recognizes that the work of
statesmanship is in large measure the finding of good substitutes for the
bad things we want.

This is the heart of a political revolution. When we recognize that the
focus of politics is shifting from a mechanical to a human center we
shall have reached what is, I believe, the most essential idea in modern
politics. More than any other generalization it illuminates the currents
of our national life and explains the altering tasks of statesmanship.

The old effort was to harness mankind to abstract principles--