could manage forty or fifty thousand with little more trouble."

"If I had it. In some ways it would be easier."

"What a waste!" I said. "Of course you ought not to _own_ these acres;
what you ought to be is the agricultural controller of just as big an
estate of the public lands as you could manage--with a suitable salary."

He reflected upon that idea. He said he did not get much of a salary
out of his land as it was, and made a regrettable allusion to Mr. Lloyd
George. "When a man tries to do his duty by his land," he said...

But here running through the thoughts of the Englishman and the Italian
and the Frenchman and the American alike one finds just the same idea
of a kind of officialdom in ownership. It is an idea that pervades our
thought and public discussion to-day everywhere, and it is an idea that
is scarcely traceable at all in the thought of the early half of the
nineteenth century. The idea of service and responsibility in property
has increased and is increasing, the conception of "hold-up," the
usurer's conception of his right to be bought out of the way, fades.
And the process has been enormously enhanced by the various big-scale
experiments in temporary socialism that have been forced upon the
belligerent powers. Men of the most individualistic quality are being
educated up to the possibilities of concerted collective action. My
friend and fellow-student Y, inventor and business organiser, who used
to make the best steam omnibuses in the world, and who is now making all
sorts of things for the army, would go pink with suspicious anger at the
mere words "inspector" or "socialism" three or four years ago. He does
not do so now.

A great proportion of this sort of man, this energetic directive sort
of man in England, is thinking socialism to-day. They may not be saying
socialism, but they are thinking it. When labour begins to realise what
is adrift it will be divided between two things: between appreciative
co-operation, for which guild socialism in particular has prepared its
mind, and traditional suspicion. I will not over to guess here which
will prevail.

3

The impression I have of the present mental process in the European
communities is that while the official class and the _rentier_ class
is thinking very poorly and inadequately and with a merely obstructive
disposition; while the churches are merely wasting their energies in
futile self-advertisement; while the labour mass is suspici