the old Egyptians placed around their mummies the necessaries of a
future existence, so I have endeavoured to lay beside the figures of
Aunts Ann and Juley and Hester, of Timothy and Swithin, of Old Jolyon
and James, and of their sons, that which shall guarantee them a little
life here-after, a little balm in the hurried Gilead of a dissolving
"Progress."

If the upper-middle class, with other classes, is destined to "move on"
into amorphism, here, pickled in these pages, it lies under glass for
strollers in the wide and ill-arranged museum of Letters. Here it rests,
preserved in its own juice: The Sense of Property. 1922._

THE MAN OF PROPERTY

by JOHN GALSWORTHY

"........You will answer
The slaves are ours....."

--Merchant of Venice.

TO EDWARD GARNETT

PART I

CHAPTER I--'AT HOME' AT OLD JOLYON'S

Those privileged to be present at a family festival of the Forsytes have
seen that charming and instructive sight--an upper middle-class family
in full plumage. But whosoever of these favoured persons has possessed
the gift of psychological analysis (a talent without monetary value and
properly ignored by the Forsytes), has witnessed a spectacle, not only
delightful in itself, but illustrative of an obscure human problem. In
plainer words, he has gleaned from a gathering of this family--no branch
of which had a liking for the other, between no three members of whom
existed anything worthy of the name of sympathy--evidence of that
mysterious concrete tenacity which renders a family so formidable a unit
of society, so clear a reproduction of society in miniature. He has been
admitted to a vision of the dim roads of social progress, has understood
something of patriarchal life, of the swarmings of savage hordes, of the
rise and fall of nations. He is like one who, having watched a tree
grow from its planting--a paragon of tenacity, insulation, and success,
amidst the deaths of a hundred other plants less fibrous, sappy, and
persistent--one day will see it flourishing with bland, full foliage, in
an almost repugnant prosperity, at the summit of its efflorescence.

On June 15, eighteen eighty-six, about four of the afternoon, the
observer who chanced to be present at the house of old Jolyon Forsyte
in Stanhope Gate, might have seen the highest efflorescence of the
Forsytes.

This was the occasion of an 'at home' to celebrate the engagement of
Miss June Forsyte, ol