Nor can we proscribe the private practitioner, for the wealthy, if there were any, or for the medically heterodox. Yet, how much bad pretentious work, how much humbug and servility, would be spared to their profession if most of them became public officials, only doctors know. I am not qualified to say whether the legal profession should be nationalized, nor how much. But things could hardly be in worse case than they are at present, when the worthy members of a necessary profession are regarded by many as little better than birds of prey. It may be said that modest State salaries would not attract able men into the professions so organized. But if the profits of trade were socialized as proposed, or divided among guild members, there would not be that golden alternative lure. II. In those matters which are left to the adjustment of free competition, it is necessary that everyone should be in a fair position to bargain, so that there may be no compulsion due to sheer starvation. This requires to be done so carefully that an actual maintenance at a tolerable standard, and permanently available without work, should not be offered to the able-bodied. Two suggestions have been made which are well worth considering. Alfred Russel Wallace proposes that a daily dole of bread, enough to sustain life, should be easily available to the indigent or the out of work. Tickets should be accessible at all Post Offices, Police Stations, and from magistrates, clergymen and others, on making out a claim of need. Thus actual starvation would be warded off.[90] A more elaborate proposal is that to whose advocacy my friend Mr. Dennis Milner and his wife are devoting their lives. He proposes that everyone, rich and poor, from birth to death, should be the recipient of a certain pension, to be provided by a four shillings in the pound Income Tax, on all incomes great and small, to be deducted at the source. Thus, one-fifth of everyone’s income would be redistributed on a flat rate, as a capitation grant. It would provide on pre-war incomes about four shillings and threepence per week per head. So that a family of five, receiving twenty-one shillings and threepence a week, or £55 a year, would also pay £55 Income Tax, if their other income was £220. They would neither lose nor gain. Every family of that size receiving a smaller income would gain by the scheme; everyone above that limit would lose. It would thus encourage marriage and the raising of families, by constituting a tax on the unmarried. The man of a thousand a year, with a wife and three children, would pay £200 and receive £55--reducing his income to £855. One great advantage to the poor would be that it would save them from most or all of the insurance premiums they pay, of all sorts. The scheme is attractively expounded in pamphlets.[91]