Then comes the monopolist instinct of property.  That, on the face of it, is a baser and more sordid one.  For patriotism at least can lay claim to some sort of delusive expansiveness beyond mere individual interest; whereas property stops short at the narrowest limits of personality.  It is no longer “Us against the world!” but “Me against my fellow-citizens!” It is the last word of the intercivic war in its most hideous avatar.  Look how it scars the fair face of our common country with its antisocial notice-boards, “Trespassers will be prosecuted.”  It says in effect, “This is my land.  As I believe, God made it; but I have acquired it, and tabooed it to myself, for my own enjoyment.  The grass on the wold grows green; but only for me.  The mountains rise glorious in the morning sun; no foot of man, save mine and my gillies’ shall tread them.  The waterfalls leap white from the ledge in the glen; avaunt there, non-possessors; your eye shall never see them.  For you the muddy street; for me, miles of upland.  All this is my own.  And I choose to monopolize it.”

Or is it the capitalist?  “I will add field to field,” he cries aloud, despite his own Scripture; “I will join railway to railway.  I will juggle into my own hands all the instruments for the production of wealth that my cunning can lay hold of; and I will use them for my own purposes against producer and consumer alike with impartial egoism.  Corn and coal shall lie in the hollow of my hand.  I will enrich myself by making dear by craft the necessaries of life; the poor shall lack, that I may roll down fair streets in needless luxury.  Let them starve, and feed me!” That temper, too, humanity must outlive.  And those who are incapable of outliving it of themselves must be taught by stern lessons, as in the splendid uprising of the spirit of man in France, that their race has outstripped them.

Next comes the monopoly of human life, the hideous wrong of slavery.  That, thank goodness, is now gone.  ’Twas the vilest of them all—­the nakedest assertion of the monopolist platform:—­“You live, not for yourself, but wholly and solely for me.  I disregard your claims to your own body and soul, and use you as my chattel.”  That worst form has died.  It withered away before the moral indignation even of existing humanity.  We have the satisfaction of seeing one dragon slain, of knowing that one monopolist instinct at least is now fairly bred out of us.

Last, and hardest of all to eradicate in our midst, comes the monopoly of the human heart, which is known as marriage.  Based upon the primitive habit of felling the woman with a blow, stunning her by repeated strokes of the club or spear, and dragging her off by the hair of her head as a slave to her captor’s hut or rock-shelter, this ugly and barbaric form of serfdom has come in our own time by some strange caprice to be regarded as of positively divine origin.  The Man says now to himself, “This woman is mine.