For the independent journal is a creature of capital and competition; it stands and falls with millionaires and railway bonds and all the abuses and glories of to-day; and as soon as the State has fairly taken its bent to authority and philanthropy, and laid the least touch on private property, the days of the independent journal are numbered.

State railways may be good things and so may State bakeries; but a State newspaper will never be a very trenchant critic of the State officials.
But again, these officials would have no sinecure.

Crime would perhaps be less, for some of the motives of crime we may suppose would pass away.
But if Socialism were carried out with any fulness, there would be more contraventions.

We see already new sins ringing up like mustard--School Board sins, factory sins, Merchant Shipping Act sins--none of which I would be thought to except against in particular, but all of which, taken together, show us that Socialism can be a hard master even in the beginning.

If it go on to such heights as we hear proposed and lauded, if it come actually to its ideal of the ant-heap, ruled with iron justice, the number of new contraventions will be out of all proportion multiplied.