nstitution.
Whether it is technically a bureaucratic department or a big business
makes little or no change in the feelings of Father in connection with
it. The water-works might or might not be nationalised; and it would
make no necessary difference to Father being fired, and no difference
at all to his being accused of playing with fire. In fact, if the
Capitalists are more likely to give him the sack, the Socialists are
even more likely to forbid him the smoke. There is no freedom for
Father except in some sort of private ownership of things like water
and fire. If he owned his own well his water could never be cut off,
and while he sits by his own fire his pipe can never be put out. That
is the real meaning of property, and the real argument against
Socialism; probably the only argument against Socialism.

4.--_For Smoking._ Nothing marks this queer intermediate phase of
industrialism more strangely than the fact that, while employers still
claim the right to sack him like a stranger, they are already
beginning to claim the right to supervise him like a son. Economically
he can go and starve on the Embankment; but ethically and hygienically
he must be controlled and coddled in the nursery. Government
repudiates all responsibility for seeing that he gets bread. But it
anxiously accepts all responsibility for seeing that he does not get
beer. It passes an Insurance Act to force him to provide himself with
medicine; but it is avowedly indifferent to whether he is able to
provide himself with meals. Thus while the sack is inconsistent with
the family, the supervision is really inconsistent with the sack. The
whole thing is a tangled chain of contradictions. It is true that in
the special and sacred text of scripture we are here considering, the
smoking is forbidden on a general and public and not on a medicinal
and private ground. But it is none the less relevant to remember that,
as his masters have already proved that alcohol is a poison, they may
soon prove that nicotine is a poison. And it is most significant of
all that this sort of danger is even greater in what is called the new
democracy of America than in what is called the old oligarchy of
England. When I was in America, people were already "defending"
tobacco. People who defend tobacco are on the road to proving that
daylight is defensible, or that it is not really sinful to sneeze. In
other words, they are quietly going mad.

5.--_Of his old Cherry-briar._