t is by no means
well off, and by no means confident of the future.

It is possible to argue that the small man ought to take more pains
about his investments, but, as a matter of fact, investing money
securely and profitably is a special occupation of extraordinary
complexity, and the common man with a few hundred pounds has no more
chance in that market than he would have under water in Sydney Harbour
amidst a shoal of sharks. It may be said that he is greedy, wants too
much interest, but that is nonsense. One of the crudest gulfs into
which small savings have gone in the case of the British public has
been the trap of Consols, which pay at the present price less than
three per cent. Servants and working men with Post Office Savings'
Bank accounts were urged, tempted and assisted to invest in this
solemn security--even when it stood at 114. Those who did so have now
(November 1907) lost almost a third of their money.

It is scarcely too much to say that a very large proportion of our
modern great properties, tramway systems, railways, gas-works, bread
companies, have been created for their present owners the debenture
holders and mortgagers, the great capitalists, by the unintentional
altruism of that voluntary martyr, the Saving Small Man.

Of course the habitual saver can insure with an insurance company for
his old age and against all sorts of misadventures, and because of the
Government interference with "private enterprise" in that sort of
business, be reasonably secure; but under Socialism he would be able
to do that with absolute security in the State Insurance Office--if
the universal old age pension did not satisfy him. That, however, is
beside our present discussion. I am writing now only of the sort of
property that Socialism would destroy, and to show how little benefit
or safety it brings to the small owner now. The unthinking rich prate
"thrift" to the poor, and grow richer by a half-judicious,
half-unconscious absorption of the resultant savings; that, in brief,
is the grim humour of our present financial method.

It is not only in relation to investments that this absorption of
small parcels of savings goes on. In every town the intelligent and
sympathetic observer may see, vivid before the eyes of all who are not
blind by use and wont, the slow subsidence of petty accumulations, The
lodging-house and the small retail shop are, as it were, social
"destructors"; all over the country they are convert