Now this gradual lessening of purchasing power on the part of the working masses under Capitalism is _the destruction of the home market_. Low wages make great masses of English bootmakers unable to buy all the boots they would. Therefore the capitalist who owns the boot-making machinery must try to sell his surplus abroad. But the foreign countries, as they grow capitalist, suffer from the same trouble: property being badly distributed and the wage-earners kept as low as possible, their power to buy foreign goods also diminishes. Thus you have _gradual destruction of the foreign market_. You get in the long run the full working of what we will call the “_Capitalist Paradox_,” which is that Capitalism is a way of producing wealth which, in the long run, prevents people from obtaining the wealth produced and prevents the owner of the wealth from finding a market. There is no doubt that, on the balance, the disadvantages of Capitalism have proved, even after its short trial, overwhelmingly greater than the advantages. Capitalism arose in small beginnings rather more than 250 years ago. It grew strong and covered the greater part of the community (in England, at least) about 100 years ago. It came to its highest development in our own time; and it is already doomed. People cannot bear it any longer. Future historians looking back upon our time will be astonished at the immense productivity of Capitalism, the enormous addition to wealth which it made, and to population, in its early phases; but perhaps they will be still more astonished at the pace at which it ran down at its end. Urged by the extreme human suffering, moral and material, which capitalism now produces, remedies have been proposed, the chief of which is generally called Socialism, or, in its fully developed form, Communism. But before we talk of this supposed remedy, which has never been put into practice (it is an imaginary state of things) we must describe the third form of state--the Distributive State. THE DISTRIBUTIVE STATE A state of society in which the families composing it are, in a determining number, owners of the land and the means of production as well as themselves the human agents of production (that is, the people who by their human energy produce wealth with those means of production), is probably the oldest, and certainly the most commonly found of all states of society. It is a state of society which you get all through the East, all through Asia, and in all the primitive states we know. It is the state to which men try to return, as a rule, after they have blundered into any other, though the first state we described--the Servile State--runs it very close as a thing suitable to human nature; for we know that the Servile State did also last for centuries quite normally and stably in the Pagan past.