But the most important and the most necessary innovation is the conversion of land and the instruments of production into the form of collective property. The form in which property should be held ought to be strictly determined by considerations of economic utility. From such considerations the Liberals themselves have introduced important changes into the system of property; they have abolished fiefs, hereditary tenancies, entail, servitudes, church and village lands, all the peculiarities of monopolistic society, because, as they said, they wished to substitute a good form of property for a bad; and they at least have no right, Marlo thinks, to turn round now on Communists or Federalists for proposing to supersede this good form of property by a better. They have themselves transformed property by law, and they have transformed it on grounds of economic advantage; they have owned that the economic superiority of a particular form of property imposes a public obligation for its compulsory introduction. They asserted the competency of the State against the monopolists, and they cannot now deny it against the socialists. If the private form of property is best, then let the State maintain it; but if the collective form is best, then the State is bound, even on the principles of Liberals themselves, to introduce it. The question can only be determined by experience of the comparative economic utility of the two. Without offering any detailed proof of his proposition from experience Marlo then affirms that the most advantageous form of property is reached when the instruments of production are the collective property of associations, and the instruments of enjoyment (except wells, bridges, and the like) are the property of individuals. Each man's house would still be his castle; his house and the fulness thereof would still belong to him; but outside of it he could acquire no individual possessions. Of land and the means of labour, he should be joint-proprietor with others, or rather joint-tenant with them under the Crown. Industrial property would be held in common by the associations that worked it, and these associations would be organized by authority with distinct charters of powers and functions. Marlo thus arrives at the same practical scheme as Marx, though by a slightly different road. Marx builds his claim on Ricardo's theory of value and Ricardo's law of necessary wages. Marlo builds his on man's natural right, as a sharer in the dominion of nature, to the most advantageous exercise of that dominion. CHAPTER VI. THE SOCIALISTS OF THE CHAIR.