The principle of Private Property is being assailed on all sides. It is now the fashion to talk glibly of the evanescence of private property, just as it is the fashion to be suffering from pyorrhœa or caries. Private property is another of the features of ancient societies which in this Muddle Age has got out of order; and the consequence is, as we should expect, that it is beginning [p32] to be suggested--nay, it has already been loudly proclaimed--that private property, as the root of all evils, should be abolished. Now in this new project of vandalism, we have not only one symptom of disease, but two. For, while we have our old friend, the morbid indolence of the sick, which cannot recreate or repair, but must suppress, we also have a frontal attack on Life itself, pressed by the forces of decay and disintegration disguised as Utopians. For private property is a principle of Life. The fact that this is everywhere apparent, does not, of course, prevent the myopic from overlooking it; it should, however, prevent the multitude from being deceived, and we believe the multitude are still not deceived. For it is obviously the multitude, the vast mass of mankind, who have the least of this world’s goods, who should be the first to be duped about this matter; and yet how long it is taking to convince them! How tenacious they seem of the old principle! How deeply must they believe in private property in order, with their handful of household sticks and baubles, to resist the morbid lie which is being reiterated by a thousand moribund voices all round them, that private property is wrong. It has been said that private property is a principle of Life. What, then, is its biological value? Its biological value is the same as the biological value of the best life itself. To be quite plain, Life as a whole does not represent a general movement upwards, from the standpoint of quality. On the contrary. The great majority of Life’s activities [p33] have a gravitating or descending tendency--that is to say, in a large number of organisms, acquired embellishments or acquired faculties and qualities more frequently have to be dropped than retained in the course of generations. Spencer has shown conclusively that by far the greater number of existing organisms are the degenerate descendants of higher species (see _Collected Essays_, Vol. I., p. 379). The laws of evolution, therefore, cover millions of cases of _retrograde metamorphosis_, or change consisting of the loss of complex qualities or members for the purpose of survival. And in all these cases of retrograde metamorphosis, instead of the identity of the individual becoming extended, it is actually diminished or reduced.