It is not the first time that Society has been challenged in what it held to be foundation principles, has been led to change those principles—and has still survived. Cautiously, and gently, not to jar or strain our unused brain areas too much, let us draw near this mighty pile and see on what it rests. Bear steadily in mind the history of human life and of all life behind it. See all the ages of pre-human evolution going on in their majestic work without any dream of such a thing as property, or ownership. See humanity in its slow beginning, developing the extra-personal medium of life, the garment, shelter, tool. See how these things, detached, yet essential, exchangeable because human, yet had to be connected with the holder for his personal good and social efficiency. Here, as we have shown in the preceding chapter, arises the true law of ownership, and ownership as natural as that of the beast of his teeth and claws, a true social law. It has no individual basis. Individuals carry their property on their bodies, it grows there. Society evolves detachable material adjuncts, the made things, the social medium. So far as this social medium is usable by all, it should be free to all. So far as it is peculiar to the specialised social functionary, it must be guaranteed to him. Society must guarantee to the individual those things which are essential to his social service. The civilised man has given up his power of caring for himself in order the better to serve Society. Society, to profit by this service, must insure right provision for the individual. In a clumsy, unjust, ill-managed way, it already does so, has always done so, it could not live else. But it has not done so fairly, or well, and, therefore, it is ill served, it suffers and sickens, and in repeated instances has died. Again and again in history we may see the process: the nascent society developing, growing more and more specialised and interdependent, that development reducing the power of individual constituents to take care of themselves, self-interest weakening in the mass as social interest became increasingly necessary; and then the most primitive members of Society, those still most actuated by pre-social instincts, the surviving savages in civilisation, taking advantage of the immense social productivity, and claiming for themselves the social wealth. They are not the world’s best servants. Their power is not the power of highly specialised talent or genius. It is a truism that the more ability a man has to serve Society in its advanced needs, as in the arts and sciences, the less ability he has to “make money,” as we call the process of individual absorption. The gold miners and the mint “make money,” all productive labour makes wealth; but those who secure the most of it for themselves are of quite another class. The verb “to make” and the verb “to take” have not the same root.