You see then how separate private property in coal mines hits a woman every time she buys coals. Well, it hits her in precisely the same way every time she buys a pair of scissors or a set of knives and forks or a flat-iron, because iron mines and silver mines differ like coal mines. It hits her every time she buys a loaf of bread, because wheat farms differ in fertility just like mines: a bushel of wheat will cost much more to raise on one farm than on another. It hits her every time she buys anything that is made in a factory, because factories differ according to their distance from railways or canals or seaports or big market towns or places where their raw materials are plentiful, or where there is natural water power to drive their works. In every case the shop price represents the cost of the article in the few mines and factories where the cost of production is greatest. It never represents the average cost taking one factory and one mine with another, which is the real national cost. Thus she is kept poor in a rich country because all the difference between the worst and the best in it is skimmed off for the private owners of the mines and factories by simply charging her more for everything she uses than the things cost. And it is to save her from this monstrous imposition that the Socialists, and many people who never dream of calling themselves Socialists, propose that the mines and factories shall be made national property instead of private property. The difference between the Socialist and non-Socialist nationalizers is that the non-Socialists aim only at cheap coal, whereas the Socialists have the ulterior object of bringing the mines into national ownership and control so as to prevent their remaining an instrument of inequality of income. On the immediate practical question of nationalization they are agreed. That is how Socialism can advance without a majority of professed Socialists in Parliament, or even without any. Note that the difference between the highest cost of production under the worst circumstances and the lower costs under more favorable circumstances is called by economists rent. Mining rents and rents of copyrights and patent rights are called royalties; and most people call nothing rent except what they pay for house and land. But rent is part of the price of everything that has a price at all, except things that are communized, and things that are produced under the most unfavorable conditions. 30 YOUR TAXES Besides buying things in the shops you have to pay rates, taxes, telephone rent (if you have a telephone), and rent of house and land. Let us examine this part of your expenditure, and see whether you get hit here again and again.