ural or horticultural holding comes to feel that there he will
toil and there later he will rest upon his labours, I do not think a
rational Socialism will war against this passion for the vine and
fig-tree. If it absolutely refuses the idea of freehold, it will
certainly not repudiate leasehold. I think the State may prove a far
more generous and sentimental landlord in many things than any private
person.

In another correlated direction, too, Socialism is quite reconcilable
with a finer quality of property than our landowner-ridden Britain
allows to any but the smallest minority. I mean property in the house
one occupies.... If I may indulge in a quite unauthorized speculation,
I am inclined to think there may be two collateral methods of
home-building in the future. For many people always there will need to
be houses to which they may come and go for longer and shorter
tenancies and which they will in no manner own. Now-a-days such people
are housed in the exploits of the jerry-builder--all England is
unsightly with their meagre pretentious villas and miserable cottages
and tenement houses. Such homes in the Socialist future will certainly
be supplied by the local authority, but they will be fair, decent
houses by good architects, fitted to be clean and lit, airy and
convenient, the homes of civilized people, sightly things altogether
in a generous and orderly world. But in addition there will be the
prosperous private person with a taste that way, building himself a
home as a lease-holder under the public landlord. For him, too, there
will be a considerable measure of property, a measure of property that
might even extend to a right, if not of bequest, then at any rate of
indicating a preference among his possible successors in the occupying
tenancy....

Then there is a whole field of proprietary sensations in relation to
official duties and responsibility. Men who have done good work in any
field are not to be lightly torn from it. A medical officer of health
who has done well in his district, a teacher who has taught a
generation of a town, a man who has made a public garden, have a moral
lien upon their work for all their lives. They do not get it under our
present conditions. I know that it will be quite easy to say all this
is a question of administration and detail. It is. But it is,
nevertheless, important to state it clearly here, to make it evident
that the coming of Socialism involves no destruction of