Thus a Trade Unionist Government, with the mass of the people at its back, could, by ruthless taxation of unearned incomes, by Factory Acts, by Wages Boards fixing wages, by Commissions fixing prices, by using the income tax to subsidize trades in which wages were low (all of these devices are already established in parliamentary practice) could redistribute the national income in such a way that the present rich would become the poor, and the laborer would be cock of the walk. What is more, that arrangement would be much more stable than the present state of affairs in which the many are poor and the few rich. The only threat to its permanence would come from the owners of property refusing to go on collecting rent and interest merely to have it nearly all seized by the tax collector. If you have a thousand a year and a turn for business, you must sometimes feel that you are really only collecting money for the Government at a commission of seventy per cent or thereabouts. Suppose the commission were reduced to twenty-five per cent, what could you do but pay £750 out of your thousand as helplessly as you now pay £250? Just as the owners of property, when they controlled Parliament, used their power to extort the utmost farthing from Labor, Labor can and probably will use its power to extort the utmost farthing from Property unless equal distribution for all is made a fundamental constitutional dogma. At present the propertied classes are looking to capitalist Trade Unions to save them from Socialism. The time is coming when they will clamor for Socialism to save them from capitalist Trade Unionism: that is, from Capitalized Labor. Already in America Trade Unionism is combining with Big Business to squeeze the sleeping partner. More of that later on. 51 DOMESTIC CAPITAL After talking so long about Capitalism in the lump, let us take a few chapters off to examine it as it affects you personally if you happen to be a lady with a little capital of your own: one who, after living in the style customary in her class, still has some money to spare to use as capital so as to increase her income. I will begin by the simple case of a woman earning money, not as an employer, but by her own work.