f course, that he did not understand our
difficulties; the land was not ours to do as we liked with, it did not
belong to the community but to certain persons, the Owners, who either
refused to let us build upon it or buy it or have anything to do with
it, or demanded money we could not produce for it; that equally the
material was not ours, but belonged to certain other Owners, and that,
thirdly, the community had insufficient money or credit to pay the
wages and maintenance and equipment of the workers who starved and
degenerated in our streets--for that money, too, was privately owned.

This would puzzle our visitor considerably.

"Why do you have Owners?" he would ask.

We might find that difficult to answer.

"But why do you let the land be owned?" he would go on. "You don't let
people own the air. And these bricks and timber you mustn't touch, the
mortar you need and the gold you need--they all came out of the
ground--they all belonged to everybody or nobody a little while ago!"

You would say something indistinct about Property.

"But why?"

"Somebody must own the things."

"Well, let the State own the things and use them for the common good.
It owns the roads, it owns the foreshores and the territorial
seas--nobody owns the air!"

If you entered upon historical explanations with him, you would soon
be in difficulties. You would find that so recently as the Feudal
System--which was still living, so to speak, yesterday--the King, who
stood for the State, held the land as the Realm, and the predecessors
of the present owners held under him merely as the administrative
officials who performed all sorts of public services and had all sorts
of privileges thereby. They have dropped the services and stuck to the
land and the privileges; that is all.

"I begin to perceive," our visitor would say as this became clear;
"your world is under the spell of an exaggerated idea, this
preposterous idea there must be an individual Owner for everything in
the world. Obviously you can't get on while you are under the spell of
that! So long as you have this private ownership in everything,
there's no help for you. You cut up your land and material in parcels
of all sorts and sizes among this multitude of irresponsible little
monarchs; you let all the material you need get distributed among
another small swarm of Owners, and clearly you can only get them to
work for public ends in the most roundabout, tedious and wasteful