“You will notice that I am keeping entirely to material instincts and things, and I will rise to the height of saying that the teaching of the destruction of the Hoarding Instinct by Socialists is a blasphemous teaching, and the blasphemy is against the Holy Spirit of Good. I have left the individual for the family, but the destruction of this instinct would wreck the individual as well as the family. “Ambition, Pride, the Hoarding Instinct, are not passions; they are Laws that govern the growth of life, and they are as immutable as the laws of gravity. “Without going further, I shall content myself with the destruction of Ambition, Pride, and the Hoarding Instinct, and leave the family robbed of them by the Advanced Socialist—and withered in its growth. I shall come back to the point I started from—the Home. Your Socialist talks of the State. “I say again—There is absolutely no such thing. There is only a collection of homes. “Behind the word State he hides his absolute ignorance of fundamentals. He fancies, as I said before, that the nation is an aggregation of individuals, and on that assumption he concludes that each individual should be tuned to the pitch of the mass, so that all should sing in harmony. “But the nation in reality is not an aggregation of individuals at all; it is an agglutination of Families or Homes. “The word State, as implying a homogeneous and isolated power, is philosophically meaningless. The State is not a separate entity from the Home. It is only, in the administrative sense, a name for the common executive which the homes of the nation have created to conduct their external affairs individually as between themselves, and collectively as between other common governments or executives. “When the Advanced Socialist talks of the welfare of the State he is talking of the welfare of the majority of individuals. When he talks of the State seizing the common wealth, he means that the majority of individuals will seize it and distribute it among themselves and the minority. He has absolutely forgotten those separate hives of sex life, industry, ambition, antagonism to other hives, and energy, which are the real units of the nation, the Families, which are by their constituent vices and virtues the breeding-grounds of all social energy and virtues. “And he would advance the world on its progress by seizing with the brute force of individuals dominion over the homes of the nation. He would allow an executive created by force to dictate to each home its foreign and domestic policy; he would limit its imports and exports, destroy its ambitions, plunder its hoard, and make slaves of its individuals. “That is Socialism pure and simple. Arsenic could not be simpler or purer as a poison to the common good and the vitality of any social community.” [Sidenote: Building, Not Breaking] “And you?”