The State can purchase thus on a small scale by subsidising purchase out of the general taxation. It can, therefore, play this trick over a small area and for a short time with success. But the moment this area passes a very narrow limit the "market for investment" is found to be restricted, Capital automatically takes alarm, the State can no longer offer its paper guarantees save at an enhanced price. If it tries to turn the position by further raising taxation to what Capital regards as "confiscatory" rates, there will be opposed to its action just the same forces as would be opposed to frank and open expropriation. The matter is one of plain arithmetic, and all the confusion introduced by the complex mechanism of "finance" can no more change the fundamental and arithmetical principles involved than can the accumulation of triangles in an ordnance survey reduce the internal angles of the largest triangle to less than 180 degrees.[8] In fine: _if you desire to confiscate, you must confiscate_. You cannot outflank the enemy, as Financiers in the city and sharpers on the racecourse outflank the simpler of mankind, nor can you conduct the general process of expropriation upon a muddle-headed hope that somehow or other something will come out of nothing in the end. There are, indeed, two ways in which the State could expropriate without meeting the resistance that must be present against any attempt at confiscation. But the first of these ways is precarious, the second insufficient. They are as follows:-- (1) The State can promise the Capitalist a larger yearly revenue than he is getting in the expectation that it, the State, can manage the business better than the Capitalist, or that some future expansion will come to its aid. In other words, if the State makes a bigger profit out of the thing than the Capitalist, it can buy out the Capitalist just as a private individual with a similar business proposition can buy him out. But the converse of this is that if the State has calculated badly, or has bad luck, it would find itself _endowing_ the Capitalists of the future instead of gradually extinguishing them. In this fashion the State could have "socialised" without confiscation the railways of this country if it had taken them over fifty years ago, promising the then owners more than they were then obtaining. But if it had socialised the hansom cab in the nineties, it would now be supporting in perpetuity that worthy but extinct type the cab-owner (and his children for ever) at the expense of the community.