In a free society, ignorance, vice and crime would tend to disappear. We should have no people in high places whose large-scale theft would make them fitter inmates for jails, and no people in jails for those petty thefts to which need is a perennial incentive. Jails, indeed, would be very little needed by such a society; for what with the abolition of the State, with its long list of law-made crimes, and the disappearance of those social conditions which are largely responsible for the few infractions of moral law which constitute real crime, there would be very few offenders to occupy them. I have already remarked that need is a constant incentive to theft; it is also the chief cause of ignorance; and ignorance and misery are fecund sources of vice, as well as of the physical and mental degeneracy which result in imbecility and idiocy. If need were removed, if every human being were assured from birth of physical well-being and ample opportunity to develop mentally to the full extent of his capacity, these distressing results of involuntary poverty would not long exist to menace the peace and health of communities and fill reformers and eugenists with alarm. The cities where human beings are crowded together under conditions subversive of health and decency would be gradually emptied of their surplus population. At present they are largely asylums for the expropriated, but when land was once more freely available they would resume their natural character as centres of industry and exchange. There would be no more centres of want, misery and vice, like centres of infection, to menace the health and well-being of society. Man, reclaimed by the land which is his natural home, would appear for what he really is, a child of the earth, rather than an industrial machine far removed from his rightful heritage of close, health-giving connexion with the soil from which his sustenance comes. Life, in short, having been placed on its natural basis, might be expected to proceed along natural lines of development. Mankind, assured of physical health, would progress steadily in health of mind and activity of spirit; and being freed from its pressing need to take thought of the morrow, it would have leisure to seek the kingdom of heaven--not that heaven which the church promises as a future reward for orthodox communicants, but the kingdom of heaven which “is within you,” the happiness that comes from the harmonious development of the highest faculties of body, mind and spirit, and their use in the promotion of a beautiful individual and collective life. Superstition and intolerance would disappear with the ignorance that produces them. Thought would no longer be hampered either by fear or the consciousness of dependence on an order of things unfit to bear the light of reason; but every human being would be free to exercise that independence of mind that only the most courageous or the most securely placed may allow themselves at present.