ide for themselves,
what is really demanded is not the command over the fluctuating
proceeds of some particular undertaking, which accompanies the
ownership of capital, but the security which is offered by an annuity.
Property is the instrument, security is the object, and when some
alternative way is forthcoming {74} of providing the latter, it does
not appear in practice that any loss of confidence, or freedom or
independence is caused by the absence of the former.

Hence not only the manual workers, who since the rise of capitalism,
have rarely in England been able to accumulate property sufficient to
act as a guarantee of income when their period of active earning is
past, but also the middle and professional classes, increasingly seek
security to-day, not in investment, but in insurance against sickness
and death, in the purchase of annuities, or in what is in effect the
same thing, the accumulation of part of their salary towards a pension
which is paid when their salary ceases. The professional man may buy
shares in the hope of making a profit on the transaction. But when
what he desires to buy is security, the form which his investment takes
is usually one kind or another of insurance. The teacher, or nurse, or
government servant looks forward to a pension. Women, who fifty years
ago would have been regarded as dependent almost as completely as if
femininity were an incurable disease with which they had been born, and
whose fathers, unless rich men, would have been tormented with anxiety
for fear lest they should not save sufficient to provide for them, now
receive an education, support themselves in professions, and save in
the same way. It is still only in comparatively few cases that this
type of provision is made; almost all wage-earners outside government
employment, and many in it, as well as large numbers of professional
men, have nothing to fall back upon in sickness or old age. But that
does not alter the fact {75} that, when it is made, it meets the need
for security, which, apart, of course, from personal possessions and
household furniture, is the principal meaning of property to by far the
largest element in the population, and that it meets it more completely
and certainly than property itself.

Nor, indeed, even when property is the instrument used to provide for
the future, is such provision dependent upon the maintenance in its
entirety of the whole body of rights which accompany ownershi