A familiar case like the following will show how this is effected. A man, we will say, occupies an ornamental cottage, which is beautiful in itself, is embowered in beautiful gardens, and also commands views of a picturesque and magnificent park, into the glades of which one of the gates of his garden opens, and which the owner allows him to use precisely as if it were his own. All his friends tell him, and tell him truly, that there is no such place of its size within fifty miles of London. They envy him his dainty drawing-room, his verandah festooned with roses, his prospect of the timbered park, and his free access to its solitudes. His friends envy him, and he feels himself that he is enviable. One morning, however, he receives a lawyer’s letter, which gives him to understand that he is really the legal owner, not of his cottage only, but of the park and property adjoining, and that with adequate legal assistance he could certainly substantiate his claim to them. In an instant his whole {367} temper of mind with regard to his surroundings is changed. His pride in his cottage is gone, and its place is taken by indignation at having been kept out of possession of the park, and by a feverish craving to acquire it. He goes to law. The case is long and difficult. He lives for months distracted by fear and hope; and when the case is finally given against him, he comes back to his cottage with his mind unhinged by the shock, contemptuous of the dwelling which once was a source of pride to him, and cursing the prospects which once were his daily pleasure. Now this craving for wealth, by which the man’s life is blighted, has been produced, precisely as such a craving normally is, by the belief on his part that certain wealth is attainable; but the belief here does not rest on a consciousness that he is able by his own abilities to create or earn it for himself; it rests on his intellectual assent to a delusive proposition that he has a legal right to it, or, in other words, that the law will make him the possessor of it without any exceptional productive effort of his own. And here we have a counterpart to the socialistic teaching of to-day. It excites, or aims at exciting, an artificial craving for wealth in men who would not naturally trouble their heads about it, by teaching them that they have a right to it, which is wholly independent of any exceptional productive power in themselves, or in any ancestors from whom they might claim to inherit. The only difference between men who are thus deluded, and {368} the claimant to the park and estate whose case we have been just imagining, is that whilst the latter is deceived into expecting that he individually can be made rich by a law-suit, the latter are deceived into expecting that they all can be made rich by legislation.