Would you bring the State in unfair competition with individuals? “Don’t for one moment,” says Bakunin, “believe that lie of lazybones. Secretaries of Finance find it easier to hire marauders than to hire skilled mechanics, that’s all.” Who is hurt by the great stockfarm at Trakehnen? It could be enlarged twenty times, and still give private enterprise a chance to raise prize-horses at a considerable profit. Who complains about Government forestry? It gives bread to hundreds of thousands; it protects the fountains of fertilizing streams; it prevents droughts, but does not prevent individuals from conducting timber-plantations at a profit exceeding that of grain farms. The Belgian Government owns coal-mines, but private mine-owners will continue to prosper till they exhaust the supply of the mineral. No glass-worker has ever objected to the Government glass-works of Saxony. They invite co-operation; the demand for artistic glass products exceeds the supply. If Government mines and factories, why not Government commerce, and, above all, Government real estate transactions—Government landlordism to an extent that will hurt no other landlord, and benefit millions of tenants? Found new communities on the plan of reserving a certain percentage of building lots for state purposes, and lease those reservations for five to ten years to the highest bidder. If the Government erects buildings, let them be models of their kind—fire-proof storehouses, sanitary tenements. Government plantations ought to be drained till gnat-plagues are no more; equipped with improved machinery, with airy cottages; a blessing to all concerned, and yet an undoubted source of revenue, since experience proves that wholesale farming operations are the most profitable. One tobacco plantation of the French Government yields a yearly net revenue of 2,000,000 francs, and the only objection is the nature of the crop; national agriculture could raise profitable harvests without catering to a stimulant habit. Government commission houses should import Jamaica bananas, rather than Jamaica rum. On the Bakunin plan, national revenue industries should, as a rule, select their ground where the strain of competition is the least likely to be felt. After that, objectors should be referred to a chronicle of such alternatives as trust despotism. “No governments,” he asks, “decline to dirty their hands delving for boodle? Oh, ye prayerful pirates! Lineal descendants of the bushwhacker princes who preferred clubs to spades! Below their dignity to cut wood, but did cut purses and throats. Too highborn to clean out a pig-sty, but did clean out peddlers and often whole caravans.