hat of an article of supply, to be charged up as an
item of operating expenses. Under this later and current system,
discretion and initiative vest not in the workman but in the owners of
the plant, if anywhere. So that at this point the right of ownership has
ceased to be, in fact, a guarantee of personal liberty to the common
man, and has come to be, or is coming to be, a guarantee of dependence.
All of which engenders a feeling of unrest and insecurity, such as to
instill a doubt in the mind of the common man as to the continued
expediency of this arrangement and of the prescriptive rights of
property on which the arrangement rests.

There is also an insidious suggestion, carrying a sinister note of
discredit, that comes in from ethnological science at this point; which
is adapted still further to derange the common man's faith in this
received institution of ownership and its control of the material
equipment of industry. To students interested in human culture it is a
matter of course that this material equipment is a means of utilising
the state of the industrial arts; that it is useful in industry and
profitable to its owners only because and in so far as it is a creation
of the current technological knowledge and enables its owner to
appropriate the usufruct of the current industrial arts. It is likewise
a matter of course that this technological knowledge, that so enables
the material equipment to serve the purposes of production and of
private gain, is a free gift of the community at large to the owners of
industrial plant; and, under latterday conditions, to them exclusively.
The state of the industrial arts is a joint heritage of the community at
large, but where, as in the modern countries, the work to be done by
this technology requires a large material equipment, the usufruct of
this joint heritage passes, in effect, into the hands of the owners of
this large material equipment.

These owners have, ordinarily, contributed nothing to the technology,
the state of the industrial arts, from which their control of the
material equipment of industry enables them to derive a gain. Indeed, no
class or condition of men in the modern community--with the possible
exception of politicians and the clergy--can conceivably contribute less
to the community's store of technological knowledge than the large
owners of invested wealth. By one of those singular inversions due to
production being managed for private gain, it