All this, however, is a mere trifle compared to the sequel. When the inland sea has risen to its confines--when there is nothing but a strip of sand round the coast between the furrow and the wave--when the very waves themselves are cultivated by fisherfolk--when the pastures and timber forests have touched the snow line--when, in short, the land is all private property, yet every man is a proprietor, though it may be only of a tenant right. He enjoys fixity of tenure at what is called a fair rent; that is, he fares as well as he could on land wholly his own. All the rent is economic rent; the landlord cannot raise it nor the tenant lower it; it is fixed naturally by the difference between the fertility of the land for which it is paid and that of the worst land in the country. Compared with the world as we know it, such a state of things is freedom and happiness. THE PROLETARIAT. But at this point there appears in the land a man in a strange plight--one who wanders from snow line to sea coast in search of land, and finds none that is not the property of some one else. Private property had forgotten this man. On the roads he is a vagrant; off them he is a trespasser; he is the first disinherited son of Adam, the first proletarian, one in whose seed all the generations of the earth shall yet be blest, but who is himself for the present foodless, homeless, shiftless, superfluous, and everything that turns a man into a tramp or a thrall. Yet he is still a man with brain and muscle, able to devise and execute, able to deal puissantly with land if he only could get access to it. But how to get that access! Necessity is the mother of Invention. It may be that this second Adam, the first father of the great proletariat, has one of those scarce brains which are not the least of Nature’s capricious gifts. If the fertile field yields rent, why not the fertile brain? Here is the first Adam’s patch still yielding its £1,000 a year to the labor of the tenant who, as we have seen, has to pay £900 away in rent. How if the proletarian were boldly to bid £1,000 a year to that man for the property? Apparently the result would be the starvation of the proletarian, since he would have to part with all the produce. But what if the proletarian can contrive--invent--anticipate a new want--turn the land to some hitherto undreamt-of use--wrest £1,500 a year from the soil and site that only yielded £1,000 before? If he can do this, he can pay the full £1,000 rent, and have an income of £500 left for himself. This is his profit--the rent of his ability--the excess of its produce over that of ordinary stupidity. Here then is the opportunity of the cunning proletarian, the hero of that modern Plutarch, Mr. Samuel Smiles. Truly, as Napoleon said, the career is open to the talented. But alas! the social question is no more a question of the fate of the talented than of the idiotic. In due replenishment of the earth there comes