Freedom to purchase is impossible unless every possible want is provided for. Perhaps this condition would exist in the Co-operative Commonwealth. Perhaps it wouldn’t! Let us take another example, John. Suppose you wanted to build a house. At present you can do this in accordance with any plans that please you. You don’t have to ask anybody’s advice if you don’t want to. But would things be like this under Socialism? You might want to build a bookcase in the centre of the room instead of around the walls. You might have very good reasons for wishing to do this. But do you think it would be a simple matter to convince the committee on carpentering that your plan should be carried out, if they happened to disapprove of your ideas? Under our present system you can get almost any kind of work done if you are willing and able to pay for it. All you have to do is to find the laborer and employ him. Under Socialism, it wouldn’t be a single laborer that would have to be seen, but a committee whose consent would have to be obtained before any laborer could undertake your work. The Socialists tell us that Socialism will inspire inventors, writers and other mental workers to a degree never before dreamt of. Is this possible? An invention to-day stands a fair chance of being put on the market so long as it has the slightest evidence of practicability; somebody can usually be found to furnish the money for the experiments needed to perfect the scheme of the inventor. But how would it be in a Commonwealth where the practicability of an invention and its value as a social factor would have to be determined by a special committee before it could be produced and its merits tested by actual experience? We know how much money has been spent in the experimental work of many inventors. We know, too, that, in the majority of cases, inventions have been perfected in the face of widespread scepticism. Few people believed that the telephone would ever be made of practical value. Even when the telephone had succeeded and become an absolute necessity, the great mass of the people laughed at the idea of wireless telegraphy. Do you think that a committee on inventions would have passed favorably upon such ideas, and would have authorized the necessary appropriations for perfecting them in the face of such strong popular opposition? Socialists also tell us that freedom is the choicest jewel in our possession; that freedom of press, speech and assemblage are rights which are inherent in human nature and which must be defended, with our lives if need be. But what do we find under Socialism? Could there be any freedom of press when the Socialist State owned every press, when the Socialist State employed every printer, when the Socialist State controlled every sheet of white paper?