Of course universal accident liability insurance followed, the cost of which must be borne by the proprietor, and, if he is a manufacturer, eventually by the consumer. As may be imagined, such laws give rise to surprising results. The report of one of the great accident liability insurance companies, made shortly after the passage of this law, exhibited, for example, the recovery of damages by a domestic servant, who, while eating a meal, had swallowed her own false teeth; another had contrived to swallow a curtain hook; a third was burned by the bed clothes taking fire from a hot iron which she had wrapped in flannel for the purpose of warming herself. The manageress of a laundry had her hands poisoned by handling copper coins. A footman was bitten while attempting to extract a cat from the jaws of a dog; a nurse-maid was burnt by letting off fire works in the back garden at a private celebration of the servants during the master's absence, and a cook had her eyes scratched by the house cat. Such absurdities show the trend of modern English legislation on the subject. A glance at an English landscape with its panorama of endless turf and forest and comparatively small areas of cultivation, in marked contrast with the minute utilization of every inch on the Continent, and the reflection that England produces only a portion of the food consumed in its crowded towns, should leave no one surprised at an agitation to modify the existing conditions, which led to continued assaults upon all forms of possession, whether of real or personal property. Acts of Parliament followed each other in quick succession depriving land owners of their holdings to inaugurate chimerical building schemes; giving rent-payers power to condemn and forcibly purchase dwelling houses; attacking property other than land by taxing the inheritance of money so heavily (on a sliding scale of percentages increasing with the size of the estate), as to approach the socialistic ideal that two deaths shall mean the absorption by the State of any large property and that no man shall enjoy a rich grandfather's accumulations; levying upon the living wealthy by ever increasing income taxes, with a like sliding scale, operating upon them alone, while exempting the poor. To this almost confiscatory taxation no limit seems to be in sight. Old age pensions--one of the most startling novelties of the collectivist--are doubtless economically impossible and morally pernicious unless required to be contributory on the part of those who may later claim them, so that they constitute a system of compulsory saving and insurance, as is the plan in Germany where socialism is at least somewhat scientific. But it remained for the once conservative England to inaugurate the distribution of universal alms without any comprehensive plan for raising the money--the weekly dole to be inevitably increased and the age limit lowered as the exigencies of vote-seeking politicians render expedient.