Socialists contend that this system of private property in land and capital is actively destructive of the conditions in which alone the common morality necessary for happy social life is possible. Without any demand upon the faith of those persons who deny the capacity of average human nature for the temperance and kindliness indispensable for the success of a true co-operative commonwealth, they assert that this modern development of the property system (a development of the last few generations only, and unprecedented in the history of the world), is more and more forcing the individual into anti-social disposition and action, and thereby destroying the promise of free and full existence, which only the health and progressive development of the social organism can give him. It has become plainly reasonable that when this is the effect of our property system, we should modify our institutions in the directions which will give us freedom, just as we modified the institutions which subjected us to a feudal aristocracy, and abolished for ever the laws which enabled one man to hold another as his chattel slave. There is on record a Greek proverb, that so soon as a man has ensured a livelihood, then he should begin to practise virtue. We all protest that he will do well to practise virtue under any circumstances; but we admit on reflection that our judgment as to what is virtuous action, depends upon the circumstances under which action is to be taken. Whether we approve the killing of one man by another, depends entirely on the circumstances of the case; and there is scarcely one of the acts which our laws regard as criminal, which could not, under imaginable circumstances, be justified. Our laws, and our conventional opinions, as to what conduct is moral or immoral, are adapted to the ordinary circumstances of the average man in society, society being in them presumed to be homogeneous, not to contain in itself essential distinctions between classes, or great contrasts between the conditions of individuals. But that element in our private property system which is at present the main object of the Socialist attack, the individual ownership of the instruments of production, land and capital, in an age when the use of those instruments has become co-operative, results, and must inevitably result, as the foregoing dissertations have sought to prove, in the division of society into two classes, whose very livelihood is ensured to them by methods essentially different. The livelihood of the typical proletarian is earned by the exercise of his faculties for useful activity: the livelihood of the typical capitalist, or owner of property, is obtained, without any contribution of his or her activity, in the form of a pension called rent, interest, or dividend, guaranteed by law out of the wealth produced from day to day by the activities of the proletariat.