The nature of privilege was obscured. It is evidently necessary, then, if the ballot is ever to be successfully employed against privilege, to know what privilege means and to clear away all confusion about it, so that the voters may see what is at fault in our economic system, and what remedial steps are necessary. The essential nature of freedom has been already shown. It comes out in the abolition of monopoly, primarily monopoly of natural resources, resulting in complete freedom of the individual to apply his productive labour where he will. It is freedom to produce, and its corollary, freedom to exchange--the _laissez-faire_, _laissez-passer_ of the Physiocrats. How this freedom is to be obtained is not for me to say. I am not a propagandist, nor do I regard the question as at present so important as that of establishing a clear understanding of the nature of freedom. When enough people come to see that the root of all bondage, economic, political, social--even the bondage of superstition and taboo--is expropriation, reimpropriation will not be long in following; and it may be achieved by a method quite different from all those which theorists have thus far devised. When people know what they need, they are usually pretty resourceful about finding means to get it; and so long as they do not know what they need, all the means of securing it that can be suggested, however excellent, must remain ineffective from the lack of sufficient will to use them. II In the foregoing chapters I have spoken of the effect that freedom would have upon this or that phase of human relations. There is really no field of human activity that would not be profoundly affected by it. A system of free economic opportunity would exert upon the lives of human beings precisely as great an influence as that exerted by the present economic system: that is to say, their mode of life, their education, their quality of spirit, their cast of thought, would all be determined by their command of wealth, precisely as they now are. But where the present economic system operates to place the great mass of wealth at the command of a very small percentage of the population and thus to keep the majority in an involuntary and oppressive poverty unfavourably affecting body, mind and spirit in a thousand ways, a system of free opportunity would place in the hands of every human being all the wealth that his labour, freely employed, could produce, and at the same time it would relieve productive labour from the heavy burden of privilege. Thus that huge share of wealth which now goes to maintain the privileged classes in luxurious idleness, and that further huge share which supports vast bureaucracies and keeps up armies and navies to secure the foreign investments of the privileged classes, would be diverted to its proper use. The number of workers would be augmented by all those privilegees and placeholders who now live without producing;[37] but opportunity would be increased