He is also, under existing conditions, very insecure.  An enormously wealthy merchant may be—­ often is—­at every moment of his life at the mercy of things that are not under his control.  If the wind blows an extra point or so, or the weather suddenly changes, or some trivial thing happens, his ship may go down, his speculations may go wrong, and he finds himself a poor man, with his social position quite gone.  Now, nothing should be able to harm a man except himself.  Nothing should be able to rob a man at all.  What a man really has, is what is in him.  What is outside of him should be a matter of no importance.

With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism.  Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things.  One will live.  To live is the rarest thing in the world.  Most people exist, that is all.

It is a question whether we have ever seen the full expression of a personality, except on the imaginative plane of art.  In action, we never have.  Caesar, says Mommsen, was the complete and perfect man.  But how tragically insecure was Caesar!  Wherever there is a man who exercises authority, there is a man who resists authority.  Caesar was very perfect, but his perfection travelled by too dangerous a road.  Marcus Aurelius was the perfect man, says Renan.  Yes; the great emperor was a perfect man.  But how intolerable were the endless claims upon him!  He staggered under the burden of the empire.  He was conscious how inadequate one man was to bear the weight of that Titan and too vast orb.  What I mean by a perfect man is one who develops under perfect conditions; one who is not wounded, or worried or maimed, or in danger.  Most personalities have been obliged to be rebels.  Half their strength has been wasted in friction.  Byron’s personality, for instance, was terribly wasted in its battle with the stupidity, and hypocrisy, and Philistinism of the English.  Such battles do not always intensify strength:  they often exaggerate weakness.  Byron was never able to give us what he might have given us.  Shelley escaped better.  Like Byron, he got out of England as soon as possible.  But he was not so well known.  If the English had had any idea of what a great poet he really was, they would have fallen on him with tooth and nail, and made his life as unbearable to him as they possibly could.  But he was not a remarkable figure in society, and consequently he escaped, to a certain degree.  Still, even in Shelley the note of rebellion is sometimes too strong.  The note of the perfect personality is not rebellion, but peace.