ces in virtue of his needs as a human being and on no other
ground. This lien, however, only operates when he is destitute; and he
can only exercise it by submitting to such conditions as the authorities
impose, which when the workhouse test is enforced means loss of liberty.
It was the leading "principle of 1834" that the lot of the pauper should
be made "less eligible" than that of the independent labourer. Perhaps
we may express the change of opinion which has come about in our day by
saying that according to the newer principle the duty of society is
rather to ensure that the lot of the independent labourer be more
eligible than that of the pauper. With this object the lien on the
common wealth is enlarged and reconstituted. Its exercise does not
entail the penal consequence of the loss of freedom unless there is
proved misfeasance or neglect on the part of the individual. The
underlying contention is that, in a State so wealthy as the United
Kingdom, every citizen should have full means of earning by socially
useful labour so much material support as experience proves to be the
necessary basis of a healthy, civilized existence. And if in the actual
working of the industrial system the means are not in actual fact
sufficiently available he is held to have a claim not as of charity but
as of right on the national resources to make good the deficiency.

That there are rights of property we all admit. Is there not perhaps a
general right _to_ property? Is there not something radically wrong with
an economic system under which through the laws of inheritance and
bequest vast inequalities are perpetuated? Ought we to acquiesce in a
condition in which the great majority are born to nothing except what
they can earn, while some are born to more than the social value of any
individual of whatever merit? May it not be that in a reasoned scheme of
economic ethics we should have to allow a true right of property in the
member of the community as such which would take the form of a certain
minimum claim on the public resources? A pretty idea, it may be said,
but ethics apart, what are the resources on which the less fortunate is
to draw? The British State has little or no collective property
available for any such purpose. Its revenues are based on taxation, and
in the end what all this means is that the rich are to be taxed for the
benefit of the poor, which we may be told is neither justice nor charity
but sheer spoliation. To