Observe the existing facts in any department of social supply we have made free to all. Our highroads are free—but we do not therefore run continually up and down on them, just because we can. We travel as we have need of it, that is all. Free roads facilitate normal traffic and promote civilisation. Yet, when it is urged that free railroad travel is a necessity to-day, there is a horrified dissent. “What? let people travel on the railroad without paying for it? Why, they would travel all the time!” You see we do use our imaginations a good deal. These objectors imagine that mankind would desert both business and pleasure, forego the joys of home and the attractions of both city and country, to spend their days in the discomforts of a railroad train, and their nights in those culture tubes of all bacilli, the sleeping cars,—just because travel was free! Have we never seen the plain and common fact that free provision of anything reduces the demand to the normal at once? Things “common” are not wanted, unless they are _really_ wanted. All artificial demand drops off. There is no pride, no element of “conspicuous waste” in having what everyone can have, in doing what everyone can do. But the normal demand goes on, and the world is enriched, all progress is promoted, by the gratification of that need. Sometimes people do things merely because they cost money,—to show financial superiority,—but they do not do things merely because they do not cost money. Free consumption would not increase any legitimate human demand, but it would increase our power, and skill, and so our wealth. Recognising that human production is conditioned upon previous supply, upon right inheritance, right education, right environment of all sorts, it follows that the more fully and freely we supply that environment, the more we produce. Against this clear sequence stand, like a range of mountains, our theories of property rights—of personal ownership. Personal ownership, private property; we believe in these things as we believe in God,—and a good deal more so. These we hold to be basic principles, they underlie all else, nothing can shake them. Whoso questions or criticises them “strikes at the foundations of Society.”