Of course the habitual saver can insure with an insurance company for his old age and against all sorts of misadventures, and because of the Government interference with "private enterprise" in that sort of business, be reasonably secure; but under Socialism he would be able to do that with absolute security in the State Insurance Office--if the universal old age pension did not satisfy him. That, however, is beside our present discussion. I am writing now only of the sort of property that Socialism would destroy, and to show how little benefit or safety it brings to the small owner now. The unthinking rich prate "thrift" to the poor, and grow richer by a half-judicious, half-unconscious absorption of the resultant savings; that, in brief, is the grim humour of our present financial method. It is not only in relation to investments that this absorption of small parcels of savings goes on. In every town the intelligent and sympathetic observer may see, vivid before the eyes of all who are not blind by use and wont, the slow subsidence of petty accumulations, The lodging-house and the small retail shop are, as it were, social "destructors"; all over the country they are converting hopeful, enterprising, ill-advised people with a few score or hundreds of pounds, slowly, inevitably into broken-hearted failures. It is, to my mind, the crudest aspect of our economic struggle. In the little High Street of Sandgate, over which my house looks, I should say between a quarter and a third of the shops are such downward channels from decency to despair; they are sanctioned, inevitable citizen breakers. Now it is a couple of old servants opening a "fancy" shop or a tobacco shop, now it is a young couple plunging into the haberdashery, now it is a new butcher or a new fishmonger or a grocer. This perpetual procession of bankruptcies has made me lately shun that pleasant-looking street, that in my unthinking days I walked through cheerfully enough. The doomed victims have a way of coming to the doors at first and looking out politely and hopefully. There is a rich and lucrative business done by certain wholesale firms in starting the small dealer in almost every branch of retail trade; they fit up his shop, stock him, take his one or two hundred pounds and give him credit for forty or fifty. The rest of his story is an impossible struggle to pay rent and get that debt down. Things go on for a time quite bravely. I go furtively and examine the goods in the window, with a dim hope that this time something really will come off; I learn reluctantly from my wife that they are no better than any one else's, and rather dearer than those of the one or two solid and persistent shops that do the steady business of the place. Perhaps I see the new people going to church once or twice very respectably, as I set out for a Sunday walk, and if they are a young couple the husband usually wears a silk hat. Presently the stock in the window begins to