“The answer to that,” replied the High President, “is that the State could by magnificent public improvements and in a hundred other ways find means of rapidly disposing of any such surplus it might acquire. It could, if necessary, pay out dividends to its citizens, as the big corporations do to their share-holders. This objection you have advanced and a thousand others, will ever be urged to any change looking to an improvement of things. The people thus opposing will be found describing their opposition as Conservatism. The true definition of a Conservatism is a man very well-off, who finds things pre-eminently satisfactory for him as they are and is, therefore, opposed to any change. Priestcraft, when it held communities and nations under its subjection, the feudal barons, emperors, kings and modern plutocrats--these, all these, you will find to have been staunch advocates of Conservatism. Did you ever reflect,” continued the High President, “upon the inequality and injustice of existing laws of property ownership? When a man composes an opera, or indites a book of poems, or writes a novel, or devises some new and useful invention, he plays the part of a creator. Out of his own brain alone that production has evolved. It did not exist before he gave it birth and the world is so much the richer. If ever a man can be said to have a proprietary right in anything, it is to that property which actually was evolved from and created by himself alone. Yet, in the case of an author, or composer, the Law protects him in that property right for only twenty-eight years, and in the case of the inventor for only seventeen years. After that, their respective productions pass into the public domain--become public property. But the man who for a mere trifle acquires a tract, or parcel, of land--which he certainly had no part in creating or putting there--and holds it while a city builds about him and the land is made valuable by the presence and the efforts of the community at large--that man owns that land in perpetuity; it is the property of him and his heirs forever. And the Law itself! What a monstrous combination of illogical deduction and of systematic injustice! The Law! Five years required to adjudicate a case which would be sufficiently disposed of in as many hours under any modern system of businesslike administration--the Law which can only be invoked under conditions of expense absurdly disproportionate to the results. Just think of a system which is supposed to adjudicate and do substantial justice between man and man and yet which nine men out of ten in the community will tell you means ruin to resort to! The Law in its methods of procedure is a century, or more, behind the times and the learned and time-honored profession of the Law is, in reality, the profession of the modern highwayman. There is no form of modern evil which more seriously demands the application of the principles of Nihilism than the Law as it to-day exists!”