--By means of the inequalities of human advantages. One man A finds himself by birth or by his own efforts (frequently the outcome of his endowments at birth) in possession of something that somebody else B very much requires; and before A relinquishes a particle of it, convention allows him to exact some service from B. According to the urgency of B’s needs and the quality of B’s gifts that service is either very strenuous or comparatively light. For instance, if A happens to be a man of rare genius, holding in his mind the secret of his country’s salvation B, the country, may voluntarily offer him fabulous wealth from her own coffers to divulge his secret knowledge, and may even involve herself in a crushing debt in order to do so. Or A may be simply a producer of corn, and B an impecunious starving man begging corn of A because he needs it as food. In the latter case, short of an act of immorality [p101] or one involving the certainty of B’s immediate injury or demise, there is scarcely anything the law forbids A from exacting from B. The service may involve B’s gradual injury. To this the law says nothing. The service may be debasing or degrading from an intellectual or spiritual point of view; it may deteriorate B’s eyesight, impair his physique or his good spirits: to all these things the law says nothing. While the service is being performed and B is obtaining corn from A, B who cannot pay cash for the corn, may be asked to do pretty well anything, with the gloomy alternative before him of going without corn altogether. This I take it is the meaning of the word violence in the mouth of the Socialist and Communist: it is the power that one man can exercise over another, in determining his occupation and in exacting service or else withholding food from him. The Socialist would admit that service must be exacted from all at some time or other, but he suggests that the State should exact it, so that the power may be exercised corporately, and the profit, if any, allotted, not to individuals, but to the whole body. The extent to which an element of violence adheres even to the proposition that the State should exact service and not the individual, would be an interesting speculation; for the fact that some violence still remains implicit in the proposition everybody will see at a glance. But the present writer hopes to point to other means by which violence must inevitably enter into the Socialistic State, just as forcibly as it does now into any well ordered capitalistic State. [p102] Quite apart then from the violence which is inherent in the proposition that the State must exact service under the Socialistic régime, it is suggested that no one, who has been following the analysis of the Socialist and Communist’s first principles given above, can up to the present be satisfied that violence would be eliminated from society under their régime any more than it can be under the present régime, and for the following reasons: