ions and class warfare, are accidental maladjustments which
are not rooted in the center of its being, but are excrescences which
economic progress itself may in time be expected to correct. That
agreeable optimism will not survive an {71} examination of the
operation of the institution of private property in land and capital in
industrialized communities. In countries where land is widely
distributed, in France or in Ireland, its effect may be to produce a
general diffusion of wealth among a rural middle class who at once work
and own. In countries where the development of industrial organization
has separated the ownership of property and the performance of work,
the normal effect of private property is to transfer to functionless
owners the surplus arising from the more fertile sites, the better
machinery, the more elaborate organization. No clearer
exemplifications of this "law of rent" has been given than the figures
supplied to the Coal Industry Commission by Sir Arthur Lowes Dickenson,
which showed that in a given quarter the costs per ton of producing
coal varied from $3.12 to $12 per ton, and the profits from nil to
$4.12. The distribution in dividends to shareholders of the surplus
accruing from the working of richer and more accessible seams, from
special opportunities and access to markets, from superior machinery,
management and organization, involves the establishment of Privilege as
a national institution, as much as the most arbitrary exactions of a
feudal _seigneur_. It is the foundation of an inequality which is not
accidental or temporary, but necessary and permanent. And on this
inequality is erected the whole apparatus of class institutions, which
make not only the income, but the housing, education, health and
manners, indeed the very physical appearance of different classes of
Englishmen almost as different from each other as though the minority
were {72} alien settlers established amid the rude civilization of a
race of impoverished aborigines.

So the justification of private property traditional in England, which
saw in it the security that each man would enjoy the fruits of his own
labor, though largely applicable to the age in which it was formulated,
has undergone the fate of most political theories. It has been refuted
not by the doctrines of rival philosophers, but by the prosaic course
of economic development. As far as the mass of mankind are concerned,
the need which private