peal to a far greater number of laws
in the nature of limitation of the owner of property than could be
quoted to show the limitation of the old supremacy of the head of the
family. In the first place he would be able to point to a constantly
increasing interference with the right of the landowner to do what he
liked with his own, building regulations, intervention to create
allotments and so forth. Then there would be a vast mass of factory
and industrial legislation, controlling, directing, prohibiting;
fencing machinery, interfering on behalf of health, justice and public
necessity with the owner's free bargain with his work-people. His
business undertakings would be under limitations his grandfather never
knew--even harmless adulterations that merely intensify profit,
forbidden him!

And in the next place and still more significant is the manifest
determination to keep in public hands many things that would once
inevitably have become private property. For example, in the middle
Victorian period a water supply, a gas supply, a railway or tramway
was inevitably a private enterprise, the creation of a new property;
now, this is the exception rather than the rule. While gas and water
and trains were supplied by speculative owners for profit, electric
light and power, new tramways and light railways are created in an
increasing number of cases by public bodies who retain them for the
public good. Nobody who travels to London as I do regularly in the
dirty, over-crowded carriages of the infrequent and unpunctual trains
of the South-Eastern Company, and who then transfers to the cleanly,
speedy, frequent--in a word, "civilized" electric cars of the London
County Council, can fail to estimate the value and significance of
this supersession of the private owner by the common-weal.

All these things, the Socialists insist, are but a beginning. They
point to a new phase in social development, to the appearance of a
collective intelligence and a sense of public service taking over
appliances, powers, enterprises, with a growing confidence that must
end finally in the substitution of collective for private ownership
and enterprise throughout the whole area of the common business of
life.

Sec. 5.

In relation to quite a number of large public services it can be shown
that even under contemporary conditions Private Ownership does work
with an enormous waste and inefficiency. Necessarily it seeks for
profit; necessarily i