And he lands, at least in imagination, in his ideal state, his Utopia. Here the noise and clamor of competitive industry is stilled. We look about us at a peaceful landscape where men and women brightly clothed and abundantly fed and warmed, sing at their easy task. There is enough for all and more than enough. Poverty has vanished. Want is unknown. The children play among the flowers. The youths and maidens are at school. There are no figures here bent with premature toil, no faces dulled and furrowed with a life of hardship. The light of education and culture has shone full on every face and illuminated it into all that it might be. The cheerful hours of easy labor vary but do not destroy the pursuit of pleasure and of recreation. Youth in such a Utopia is a very springtime of hope: adult life a busy and cheery activity: and age itself, watching from its shady bench beneath a spreading tree the labors of its children, is but a gentle retrospect from which material care has passed away. It is a picture beautiful as the opalescent colors of a soap bubble. It is the vision of a garden of Eden from which the demon has been banished. And the Demon in question is the Private Ownership of the Means of Production. His name is less romantic than those of the wonted demons of legend and folklore. But it is at least suitable for the matter-of-fact age of machinery which he is supposed to haunt and on which he casts his evil spell. Let him be once exorcised and the ills of humanity are gone. And the exorcism, it appears, is of the simplest. Let this demon once feel the contact of state ownership of the means of production and his baneful influence will vanish into thin air as his mediæval predecessors did at the touch of a thimbleful of holy water. This, then, is the socialist's program. Let "the state" take over all the means of production--all the farms, the mines, the factories, the workshops, the ships, the railroads. Let it direct the workers towards their task in accordance with the needs of society. Let each labor for all in the measure of his strength and talent. Let each receive from all in the measure of his proper needs. No work is to be wasted: nothing is to be done twice that need only be done once. All must work and none must be idle: but the amount of work needed under these conditions will be so small, the hours so short, and the effort so slight, that work itself will no longer be the grinding monotonous toil that we know to-day, but a congenial activity pleasant in itself.