6. When there is an alarm of fire in a theatre, any one who could convince the audience that there was time enough for them all to file out in slow succession by the door, would avert the greatest danger that threatened them, that of being crushed and trampled on by one another. Mankind in pursuit of wealth are like a crowd rushing excitedly through a narrow place of exit. Whatever man, or body of men, or institution, or doctrine, will moderate this "love of money" ([Greek: philargyria]), which St. Paul (1 Tim. vi. 10) declares to be "the root of all evils," the same is a benefactor to the human race, preventing that cruel oppression of the poor, which comes of ruthlessly buying land, labour, everything, in the cheapest market and selling it in the dearest. The landlord who always evicts, if he is not paid the highest competition rent,--the employer who brings in from afar the hands that will work at the lowest starvation wage,--these vultures are worse enemies to society than Socialists, for they occasion Socialism. 7. Socialism, whether in land alone or in all capital, is an endeavour to accomplish by State control the results that ought to be achieved by private virtue. A landlord, or an employer, who remembers his position as being what Homer calls "a king of men," [Greek: anax andron],--remembers too, with Aristotle, that a prince exists for his people,--and who, besides a quasi-royal care for the body of tenantry or workmen over whom he presides, has something too of a fatherly interest in every one of them, their persons and their families, holding it to be a personal tie with himself, to be in his employment or settled upon his land,--such a man and the multitude of such men form the best bulwark a country can possess against Socialism. Such a landlord or employer is a _praesens numen_ to his workpeople or tenants. In the absence of this protective, personal influence of the rich over the poor; in the disorganization of society consequent upon the misconduct of its subordinate chiefs; in the stand-off attitude of the higher classes, and the defiant independence of the lower; and in the greed of material goods that is common to them both, there lurks a danger of unknown magnitude to our modern civilization. _Reading_.--Leo XIII. on the Condition of Labour, Encyclical of 15th May, 1891. [Footnote 20] [Footnote 20: "The right of property attaches to things produced by labour, but cannot attach to things created by God." So Henry George, _Condition of Labour_, pp. 3, 4. How then do we read in _Progress and Poverty_, bk. 7. ch. 1: "The pen with which I am writing is justly mine," and that, in the last resort, on account of "the rights of those who dug the material from the ground and converted it into a pen"? Was not that material, iron-ore, "created by God," equally with any other portion of the earth's crust that we may please to call _land_?] CHAPTER VIII. OF THE STATE.