as of freedom, and to
see how inevitably the most reluctant and unlikely people have been
forced to recognize Private Ownership in this trade and for profit as
the ultimate evil. I am delighted to have to hand an excellent little
tract by "A Ratepayer": _National Efficiency and the Drink Traffic_.
It has a preface by Mr. Haldane, and it is as satisfactory a
demonstration of the absolute necessity of thoroughgoing Socialism in
this particular field as any Socialist could wish. One encounters the
Bishop of Chester, for example, in its pages talking the purest
Socialism, and making the most luminous admissions of the
impossibility of continued private control, in phrases that need but a
few verbal changes to apply equally to milk, to meat, to bread, to
housing, to book-selling[7]....

[7] For a clear and admirable account of the Socialist
attitude to the temperance question, see the tract on
_Municipal Drink Traffic_ published by the Fabian Society;
price one penny.

Sec. 7.

Land and housing, railways, food, drink, coal, in each of these great
general interests there is a separate strong case for the substitution
of collective control for the Private Ownership methods of the present
time. There is a great and growing number of people like "A Ratepayer"
and Mr. Haldane, who do not call themselves Socialists but who are yet
strongly tinged with Socialist conceptions; who are convinced--some in
the case of the land, some in the case of the drink trade or the milk,
that Private Ownership and working for profit must cease. But they
will not admit a general principle, they argue each case on its
merits.

The Socialist maintains that, albeit the details of each problem must
be studied apart, there does underlie all these cases and the whole
economic situation at the present time, one general fact, that through
our whole social system from top to base we find things under the
influence of a misleading idea that must be changed, and which, until
it is changed, will continue to work out in waste, unserviceableness,
cramped lives and suffering and death. Each man is for himself, that
is this misleading idea, seeking, perforce, ends discordant with the
general welfare; who serves the community without exacting pay, goes
under; who exacts pay without service prospers and continues; success
is not to do well, it is to have and to get; failure is not to do ill,
it is to lose and not have; and under th