the English Radicals, there has been a growing disposition to impose a tax of twenty shillings in the pound on obviously unearned incomes; that is, to dump four hundred and fifty millions[84] a year down on the Exchequer counter; and then retire with three cheers for the restoration of the land to the people. The results of such a proceeding, if it actually came off, would considerably take its advocates aback. The streets would presently be filled with starving workers of all grades, domestic servants, coach-builders, decorators, jewellers, lace-makers, fashionable professional men, and numberless others whose livelihood is at present gained by ministering to the wants of these and of the proprietary class. “This,” they would cry, “is what your theories have brought us to! Back with the good old times, when we received our wages, which were at least better than nothing.” Evidently the Chancellor of the Exchequer would have three courses open to him. (1) He would give the money back again to the landlords and capitalists with an apology. (2) He could attempt to start State industries with it for the employment of the people. (3) Or he could simply distribute it among the unemployed. The last is not to be thought of: anything is better than _panem et circenses_. The second (starting State industries) would be far too vast an undertaking to get on foot soon enough to meet the urgent difficulty. The first (the return with an apology) would be a _reductio ad absurdum_ of the whole affair--a confession that the private proprietor, for all his idleness and his voracity, is indeed performing an indispensable economic function--the function of capitalising, however wastefully and viciously, the wealth which surpasses his necessarily limited power of immediate personal consumption. And here we have checkmate to mere Henry Georgism, or State appropriation of rent without Socialism. It is easy to shew that the State is entitled to the whole income of the Duke of Westminster, and to argue therefrom that he should straightway be taxed twenty shillings in the pound. But in practical earnest the State has no right to take five farthings of capital from the Duke or anybody else until it is ready to invest them in productive enterprise. The consequences of withdrawing capital from private hands merely to lock it up unproductively in the treasury would be so swift and ruinous, that no statesman, however fortified with the destructive resources of abstract economics, could persist in it. It will be found in the future as in the past that governments will raise money only because they want it for specific purposes, and not on _a priori_ demonstrations that they have a right to it. But it must be added that when they _do_ want it for a specific purpose, then, also in the future as in the past, they will raise it without the slightest regard to _a priori_ demonstrations that they have no right to it.