goods which was in each case sufficient for a decent livelihood. For the fundamental justification of any distribution is to be sought in human needs; and among human needs the most deserving and the most urgent are those which must be satisfied as a prerequisite to right and reasonable life. Now it is true that private ownership of land has nowhere realised this principle of proportional equality and proportional justice. No such result is possible in a system that, in addition to other difficulties, would be required to make a new distribution at every birth and at every death. Private ownership of land can never bring about ideal justice in distribution. Nevertheless it is not necessarily out of harmony with the demands of _practical_ justice. A community that lacks either the knowledge or the power to establish the ideal system is not guilty of actual injustice because of this failure. In such a situation the proportionally equal rights of all men to the bounty of nature are not actual rights. They are conditional, or hypothetical, or suspended. At best they have no more moral validity than the right of a creditor to a loan that, owing to the untimely death of the debtor, he can never recover. In both cases it is misleading to talk of injustice; for this term always implies that some person or community is guilty of some action which could have been avoided. The system of private landownership is not, indeed, perfect; but this is not exceptional in a world where the ideal is never attained, and all things are imperfect. Henry George declares that "there is on earth no power which can rightfully make a grant of exclusive ownership in land"; but what would he have a community do which has never heard of his system? Introduce some crude form of communism, or refrain from using the land at all, and permit the people to starve to death in the interests of ideal justice? Evidently such a community must make grants of exclusive ownership, and these will be as valid in reason and in morals as any other act that is subject to human limitations which are at the time irremovable.