Property remains as an instinct perhaps with most of the citizens; as an experience and a reality it is unknown to nineteen out of twenty. One hundred forms of fraud, the necessary corollary of unrestrained competition between a few and of unrestrained avarice as the motive controlling production, are not or cannot be punished: petty forms of violence in theft and of cunning in fraud the laws can deal with, but they cannot deal with these alone. Our legal machinery has become little more than an engine for protecting the few owners against the necessities, the demands, or the hatred of the mass of their dispossessed fellow-citizens. The vast bulk of so-called "free" contracts are to-day leonine contracts: arrangements which one man was free to take or to leave, but which the other man was not free to take or to leave, because the second had for his alternative starvation. Most important of all, the fundamental social fact of our movement, far more important than any security afforded by law, or than any machinery which the State can put into action, is the fact that livelihood is at the will of the possessors. It can be granted by the possessors to the non-possessors, or it can be withheld. The real sanction in our society for the arrangements by which it is conducted is not punishment enforceable by the Courts, but the withholding of _livelihood_ from the dispossessed by the possessors. Most men now fear the loss of employment more than they fear legal punishment, and the discipline under which men are coerced in their modern forms of activity in England is the fear of dismissal. The true master of the Englishman to-day is not the Sovereign nor the officers of State, nor, save indirectly, the laws; his true master is the Capitalist. Of these main truths everyone is aware; and anyone who sets out to deny them does so to-day at the peril of his reputation either for honesty or for intelligence. If it be asked why things have come to a head so late (Capitalism having been in growth for so long), the answer is that England, even now the most completely Capitalist State of the modern world, did not itself become a completely Capitalist State until the present generation. Within the memory of men now living half England was agricultural, with relations domestic rather than competitive between the various human factors to production. This moral strain, therefore, arising from the divergence between what our laws and moral phrases pretend, and what our society actually is, makes of that society an utterly unstable thing. This spiritual thesis is of far greater gravity than the narrow materialism of a generation now passing might imagine. Spiritual conflict is more fruitful of instability in the State than conflict of any other kind, and there is acute spiritual conflict, conflict in every man's conscience and ill-ease throughout the commonwealth when the realities of society are divorced from the moral base of its institution.