But it may be asked how Individualism, which is now more or less dependent on the existence of private property for its development, will benefit by the abolition of such private property.  The answer is very simple.  It is true that, under existing conditions, a few men who have had private means of their own, such as Byron, Shelley, Browning, Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, and others, have been able to realise their personality more or less completely.  Not one of these men ever did a single day’s work for hire.  They were relieved from poverty.  They had an immense advantage.  The question is whether it would be for the good of Individualism that such an advantage should be taken away.  Let us suppose that it is taken away.  What happens then to Individualism?  How will it benefit?

It will benefit in this way.  Under the new conditions Individualism will be far freer, far finer, and far more intensified than it is now.  I am not talking of the great imaginatively-realised Individualism of such poets as I have mentioned, but of the great actual Individualism latent and potential in mankind generally.  For the recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses.  It has led Individualism entirely astray.  It has made gain not growth its aim.  So that man thought that the important thing was to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be.  The true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in what man is.

Private property has crushed true Individualism, and set up an Individualism that is false.  It has debarred one part of the community from being individual by starving them.  It has debarred the other part of the community from being individual by putting them on the wrong road, and encumbering them.  Indeed, so completely has man’s personality been absorbed by his possessions that the English law has always treated offences against a man’s property with far more severity than offences against his person, and property is still the test of complete citizenship.  The industry necessary for the making money is also very demoralising.  In a community like ours, where property confers immense distinction, social position, honour, respect, titles, and other pleasant things of the kind, man, being naturally ambitious, makes it his aim to accumulate this property, and goes on wearily and tediously accumulating it long after he has got far more than he wants, or can use, or enjoy, or perhaps even know of.  Man will kill himself by overwork in order to secure property, and really, considering the enormous advantages that property brings, one is hardly surprised.  One’s regret is that society should be constructed on such a basis that man has been forced into a groove in which he cannot freely develop what is wonderful, and fascinating, and delightful in him—­in which, in fact, he misses the true pleasure and joy of living.