In the concrete, to put property in the hands of "none" means to vest it as a trust in the hands of political officers. If you say that the evils proceeding from Capitalism are due to the institution of property itself, and not to the dispossession of the many by the few, then you must forbid the private possession of the means of production by any particular and private part of the community: but someone must control the means of production, or we should have nothing to eat. So in practice this doctrine means the management of the means of production by those who are the public officers of the community. Whether these public officers are themselves controlled by the community or no has nothing to do with this solution on its economic side. The essential point to grasp is that the only alternative to private property is public property. Somebody must see to the ploughing and must control the ploughs; otherwise no ploughing will be done. It is equally obvious that if you conclude property in itself to be no evil but only the small number of its owners, then your remedy is to increase the number of those owners. So much being grasped, we may recapitulate and say that a society like ours, disliking the name of "slavery," and avoiding a direct and conscious re-establishment of the slave status, will necessarily contemplate the reform of its ill-distributed ownership on one of two models. The first is the negation of private property and the establishment of what is called Collectivism: that is, the management of the means of production by the political officers of the community. The second is the wider distribution of property until that institution shall become the mark of the whole State, and until free citizens are normally found to be possessors of capital or land, or both. The first model we call _Socialism_ or the Collectivist State; the second we call the Proprietary or Distributive State. With so much elucidated, I will proceed to show in my next section why the second model, involving the redistribution of property, is rejected as impracticable by our existing Capitalist Society, and why, therefore, the model chosen by reformers is the first model, that of a Collectivist State. I shall then proceed to show that at its first inception all Collectivist Reform is necessarily deflected and evolves, in the place of what it had intended, a new thing: a society wherein the owners remain few and wherein the proletarian mass accepts security at the expense of servitude. * * * * * Have I made myself clear? If not, I will repeat for the third time, and in its briefest terms, the formula which is the kernel of my whole thesis. The Capitalist State breeds a Collectivist Theory which _in action_ produces something utterly different from Collectivism: to wit, the /Servile State/. Section Seven Socialism Is the Easiest Apparent Solution of the Capitalist Crux