oint of modern
individualism and of modern Socialism. To the one, individual
possession is right and justice, and social confiscation is wrong and
injustice; to the other, individual possession is wrong and injustice,
and confiscation is right and justice. This is the real issue. Unless
a man accept the last-named standpoint unreservedly, he has no right
to call himself a Socialist. If he does accept it, he will seek the
shortest and most direct road to the attainment of justice rather than
any longer and more indirect ones, of which it is at best doubtful
whether they will attain the end at all. For be it remembered the
moment you tamper with the sacredness of private property, no matter
how mildly, you surrender the conventional bourgeois principle of
justice, while the moment you talk of compensation you surrender the
Socialist principle of justice, for compensation can only be real if
it is adequate, and can only be adequate if it counterbalances, and
thereby annuls, the confiscation. It is just, says the individualist,
for a man to be able to do what he likes with his own. Good; but what
is his own?"[309] "The great act of confiscation will be the seal of
the new era; then and not till then will the knell of civilisation,
with its rights of property and its class society, be sounded; then,
and not till then, will justice--the justice not of civilisation but
of Socialism--become the corner-stone of the social arch."[310]

I think the straightforwardness of Bax is preferable to the crooked
and insincere explanations and proposals of the British and foreign
Socialist given in the foregoing. Bax's opinion is irrefutable.
According to the doctrines of Socialism given in Chapter IV., labour
is the source of all wealth; the greater part of the products of that
labour is dishonestly abstracted from the labourer by the capitalist
class, which has converted the result of that labour into property.
Hence Socialists think with Proudhon, and they very often openly
declare, that property is theft. Capitalist society will not
compensate the thief when taking from him his booty. Socialism will
not compensate property-owners when taking away their property.
Besides, compensation would be utterly opposed to the root idea of
Socialist justice. At present expropriation without indemnity is
called theft, but it would not be called theft under a Socialist
_regime_. The chapter on "Law and Justice under Socialism" will make
that quite c