It is, therefore, a very shallow wit that taunts contemporary Liberalism with inconsistency in opposing economic protection while it supports protective legislation for the manual labourer. The two things have nothing in common but that they are restraints intended to operate in the interests of somebody. The one is a restraint which, in the Liberal view, would operate in favour of certain industries and interests to the prejudice of others, and, on the whole, in favour of those who are already more fortunately placed and against the poorer classes. The other is a restraint conceived in the interest primarily of the poorer classes with the object of securing to them a more effective freedom and a nearer approach to equality of conditions in industrial relations. There is point in the argument only for those who conceive liberty as opposed to restraint as such. For those who understand that all social liberty rests upon restraint, that restraint of one man in one respect is the condition of the freedom of other men in that respect, the taunt has no meaning whatever. The liberty which is good is not the liberty of one gained at the expense of others, but the liberty which can be enjoyed by all who dwell together, and this liberty depends on and is measured by the completeness with which by law, custom, or their own feelings they are restrained from mutual injury. Individualism, as ordinarily understood, not only takes the policeman and the law court for granted. It also takes the rights of property for granted. But what is meant by the rights of property? In ordinary use the phrase means just that system to which long usage has accustomed us. This is a system under which a man is free to acquire by any method of production or exchange within the limits of the law whatever he can of land, consumable goods, or capital; to dispose of it at his own will and pleasure for his own purposes, to destroy it if he likes, to give it away or sell it as it suits him, and at death to bequeath it to whomsoever he will. The State, it is admitted, can take a part of a man's property by taxation. For the State is a necessity, and men must pay a price for security; but in all taxation the State on this view is taking something from a man which is "his," and in so doing is justified only by necessity. It has no "right" to deprive the individual of anything that is his in order to promote objects of its own which are not necessary to the common order. To do so is to infringe individual rights and make a man contribute by force to objects which he may view with indifference or even with dislike. "Socialistic" taxation is an infringement of individual freedom, the freedom to hold one's own and do as one will with one's own. Such seems to be the ordinary view.