"So one might go on. But you begin to see now one set of reasons at least why every one has not good comfortable boots. There could be plenty of leather; and there is certainly plenty of labour and quite enough intelligence in the world to manage that and a thousand other desirable things. But this institution of Private Property in land and naturally produced things, these obstructive claims that prevent you using ground, or moving material, and that have to be bought out at exorbitant prices, stand in the way. All these owners hang like parasites upon your enterprise at its every stage; and by the time you get your sound boots well made in England, you will find them costing about a pound a pair--high out of reach of the general mass of people. And you will perhaps not think me fanciful and extravagant when I confess that when I realize this and look at poor people's boots in the street, and see them cracked and misshapen and altogether nasty, I seem to see also a lot of little phantom land-owners, cattle-owners, house-owners, owners of all sorts, swarming over their pinched and weary feet like leeches, taking much and giving nothing and being the real cause of all such miseries." § 3. Our visitor would not only be struck by the clogging of our social activities through this system of leaving everything to private enterprise; he would also be struck by the immense wastefulness. Everywhere he would see things in duplicate and triplicate; down the High Street of any small town he would find three or four butchers--mostly selling New Zealand mutton and Argentine beef as English--five or six grocers, three or four milk shops, one or two big drapers and three or four small haberdashers, milliners, and "fancy shops," two or three fishmongers, all very poor, all rather bad, most of them in debt and with their assistants all insecure and underpaid. He would find in spite of this wealth of competition that every one who could contrive it, all the really prosperous people in fact, bought most of their food and drapery from big London firms. But why should I go on writing fresh arguments when we have Elihu's classic tract[4] to quote. [4] Elihu's tracts are published by the Independent Labour Party at one penny each. The best are: _Whose Dog Art Thou?_ _A Nation of Slaves_; _Milk and Postage Stamps_; _A Corner in Flesh and Blood_; and _Simple Division_.