that have to be bought out at
exorbitant prices, stand in the way. All these owners hang
like parasites upon your enterprise at its every stage; and by
the time you get your sound boots well made in England, you
will find them costing about a pound a pair--high out of reach
of the general mass of people. And you will perhaps not think
me fanciful and extravagant when I confess that when I realize
this and look at poor people's boots in the street, and see
them cracked and misshapen and altogether nasty, I seem to see
also a lot of little phantom land-owners, cattle-owners,
house-owners, owners of all sorts, swarming over their pinched
and weary feet like leeches, taking much and giving nothing
and being the real cause of all such miseries."

Sec. 3.

Our visitor would not only be struck by the clogging of our social
activities through this system of leaving everything to private
enterprise; he would also be struck by the immense wastefulness.
Everywhere he would see things in duplicate and triplicate; down the
High Street of any small town he would find three or four
butchers--mostly selling New Zealand mutton and Argentine beef as
English--five or six grocers, three or four milk shops, one or two big
drapers and three or four small haberdashers, milliners, and "fancy
shops," two or three fishmongers, all very poor, all rather bad, most
of them in debt and with their assistants all insecure and underpaid.
He would find in spite of this wealth of competition that every one
who could contrive it, all the really prosperous people in fact,
bought most of their food and drapery from big London firms.

But why should I go on writing fresh arguments when we have Elihu's
classic tract[4] to quote.

[4] Elihu's tracts are published by the Independent Labour
Party at one penny each. The best are: _Whose Dog Art Thou?_
_A Nation of Slaves_; _Milk and Postage Stamps_; _A Corner
in Flesh and Blood_; and _Simple Division_.

"Observe how private enterprise supplies the streets with
milk. At 7.30 a milk cart comes lumbering along and delivers
milk at one house and away again. Half-an-hour later another
milk cart arrives and delivers milk, first on this side of the
street and then on that, until seven houses have been
supplied, and then he departs. During the next three or four
hours four other milk carts put in an appearanc