enterprises and new and
doubtful experiments outside the range of legitimate State activity.
In these, interested and prosperous people will embark their surplus
money as shareholders in a limited liability company, making
partnership profits or losses in an entirely proper manner. But
whether there should be debentures and mortgages or preference shares,
or suchlike manipulatory distinctions, or interest in any shape or
form, I am inclined to doubt. A money-lender should share risk as well
as profit--that is surely the moral law in lending that forbids usury;
he should not be allowed to bleed a failing business with his
inexorable percentage and so eat up the ordinary shareholder or
partner any more than the landlord should be allowed to eat up the
failing tenant for rent. That was once the teaching of Christianity,
and I do not know enough of the history or spiritual development of
the Catholic Church to tell when she became what she now appears to
be--the champion of the rent-exacting landlord and the usurer against
Socialism. It is the present teaching of Socialism. If usury obtains
at all under the Socialist State, if inexorable repayments are to be
made in certain cases, it will, I conceive, be a State monopoly. The
State will be the sole banker for every hoard and every enterprise,
just as it will be the universal landlord and the universal fire and
accident and old age insurance office. In money matters as in public
service and administration, it will stand for the species, the
permanent thing behind every individual accident and adventure.

Posthumous property, that is to say the power to bequeath and the
right to inherit things, will also persist in a mitigated state under
Socialism. There is no reason whatever why it should not do so. There
is a strong natural sentiment in favour of the institution of
heirlooms, for example; one feels a son might well own--though he
should certainly not sell--the intimate things his father desires to
leave him. The pride of descent is an honourable one, the love for
one's blood, and I hope that a thousand years from now some descendant
will still treasure an obsolete weapon here, a picture there, or a
piece of faint and faded needlework from our days and the days before
our own. One may hate inherited privileges and still respect a family
tree.

Widows and widowers again have clearly a kind of natural property in
the goods they have shared with the dead; in the home, in the