It is well known that there are persons in this country, as in France and elsewhere, who hold the opinion that the evils of unequal distribution would be annihilated by annihilating the distinctions of rent, profits, and wages; making the whole society the sole landowner and capitalist, and all its members labourers. It is impossible to doubt the benevolent intentions of the leading preachers of this doctrine, whose exertions have originated in sympathy with the most-suffering portion of the community; but it is equally impossible to their opponents to allow that any arbitrary arrangements of existing resources can exclude want, while the primary laws of proportion are left uncontrolled. When the advocates of a common stock can show that their system augments capital and regulates population more effectually than the system under which individual property is held, their pretensions will be regarded with more favour than they have hitherto engaged. At present, it is pretty evident that in no way is capital so little likely to be taken care of as when it belongs to every body,—_i.e._ to nobody; and that, but for the barriers of individual rights of property, the tide of population would flow in with an overwhelming force. There may be an age to come when the institution of property shall cease with the occasions for it; but such an age is barely within our ken. Meantime, our pauper system exhibits the consequences of a promise of maintenance without a restriction of numbers by the state. If it were possible now to establish common-stock institutions which should include the entire community, they would soon become so many workhouses, or pauper barracks. If any one doubts this, let him ask himself how capital is to be husbanded and cherished when it is nobody’s interest to take care of it, and how population is to be regulated when even the present insufficient restraints are taken away. If education is to supply the deficiency of other stimuli and restraints, let us have education in addition. We want it enough as an addition before we can think of trying it as a substitution. We must see our fathers of families exemplary in providing for their own offspring before they can be trusted to labour and deny themselves from an abstract sense of duty. As for the main principle of the objections to the abolition of proprietorship, it is contained in the following portion of one of my summaries of principles:— It is supposed by some that these tendencies to the fall of wages and profits may be counteracted by abolishing the distinctions of shares, and casting the whole produce of land, capital, and labour, into a common stock. But this is a fallacy.