yeggs and thugs, pimps and card-sharpers.

Let us suppose that the developing social conscience places under the ban
receipt of private income from land and other natural resources, and that
a powerful movement aiming at the confiscation of such resources is under
way. It is superfluous to point out that the vast interests threatened
would offer a desperate resistance. The warfare against an incomparably
lesser interest, the liquor trade, has taxed all the resources of the
modern democratic state--on the whole the most absolute political
organization known. In no instance has the state come out of the struggle
completely victorious; the proscribed interest is yielding ground, if at
all, only very slowly. What, then, would be the outcome of a struggle
against the vastly greater landed interest? Perhaps the state would be
victorious in the end. But for generations the landed interest would
survive, if not by title of common law, at least by title of common
corruption. And in the course of the conflict, we can not doubt that
political disorder would flourish as never before, and that under its
shelter private vice and crime would develop almost unchecked.

We should disabuse ourselves of the notion that the will of a mere
majority is absolute in the state. The law is a reality only when the
outlawed interests represent an insignificant minority. Arbitrarily to
increase the outlawed interests is to undermine the very foundations of
society.


VI

The trend of the foregoing discussion, it will be said, is reactionary in
the extreme. There are, as all must admit, private interests that are