all real or share properties to trustees. Vigorous confiscation is a
particularly logical punishment for the proven corruption of public
officers by any property owner or group of property owners. Rich men
who bribe are a danger to any state. Beyond the limits of lunacy it
might be possible to define a condition of malignancy or ruthlessness
that would justify confiscation, attempts to form corners in the
necessities of life, for example, could be taken as evidence of such a
condition. All such measures as this would be far more beneficial than
the immediate improvement they would effect in public management. They
would infect the whole social body with the sense that property was
saturated with responsibility and was in effect a trust, and that would
be a good influence upon rich and poor alike.

Moreover, as public bodies became more efficient and more trustworthy,
the principle already established in British social polity by Sir
William Vernon Harcourt's Death Duties, the principle of whittling
great properties at each transfer, might be very materially extended.
Every transfer of property might establish a state mortgage for some
fraction of the value of that property. The fraction might be small
when the recipient was a public institution, considerable in the case
of a son or daughter, and almost all for a distant relative or no
kindred at all. By such devices the evil influence of property acquired
by mere accidents would be reduced without any great discouragement of
energetic, enterprising, and inventive men. And a man ambitious to
found a family might still found one if he took care to marry wisely
and train and educate his children to the level of the position he
designed for them.

While the New Republican brings such expedients as this to bear upon
property from above, there will also be the expedients of the Minimum