Now in one sense there is no other way. All the businesses that need to have many weeks or months or years of work done on them by large bodies of men before they can pay their way, require great quantities of spare subsistence. If it takes ten years to make a harbor or twenty years to make a coal mine, the men who are making it will be eating their heads off all that time. Other people must be providing them with food, clothes, lodging, and so forth without immediate return, just as parents have to provide for growing children. In this respect it makes no difference whether we vote for Capitalism or Socialism. The process is one of natural necessity which cannot be changed by any political revolution nor evaded by any possible method of social organization. But it does not follow that the collection and employment of spare subsistence for these purposes must be done by private companies touting for the money that very rich people are too gorged with luxuries to be able to spend, and that people of more moderate means are prudent enough to put by for a rainy day. To begin with, there are many most necessary things that the private companies and employers will not do because they cannot make people pay for them when they are done. Take for instance a lighthouse. Without lighthouses we should hardly dare to go to sea; and the trading ships would have to go so slowly and cautiously, and so many of them would be wrecked, that the cost of the goods they carry would be much higher than it is. Therefore we all benefit greatly by lighthouses, even those of us who have never seen the sea and never expect to. But the capitalists will not build lighthouses. If the lighthouse keeper could collect a payment from every ship that passed, they would build them fast enough until the cost was lighted all round like the sea front in Brighton; but as this is impossible, and the lighthouses must shine on every ship impartially without making the captain put his hand in his pocket for it, the capitalists leave the coast in the dark. Therefore the Government steps in and collects spare subsistence in the shape of taxes from everybody (which is quite fair, as everybody shares the benefit), and builds the lighthouses. Here we see Capitalism failing completely to supply what to a seafaring nation like ours is one of the first necessaries of life (for we should starve without our shipping) and thereby forcing us to resort to Communism. But Capitalism often refuses necessary work even when some money can be made out of it directly.