ABSTRACT
Reforms in land tenure and in housing, in taxation and rating, most factory and other industrial laws, much hygienic, temperance and moral legislation, involve frontal attacks on some form of improperty. Improperty has many subtler and safer methods of defending itself than a resort to physical force. If the law does not afford an adequate defence of improperty, it can be amended for the purpose, assuming, as is commonly the case, that the legislature contains a large enough proportion of persons interested in seeing that this is done. Militarism means, in the first place, that the propertied classes who furnish the command, possess and are aware of possessing in the army a final and sure bulwark of defence against any really dangerous attack upon their political and economic power, “the interestocracy,” either in the way of mob violence, a withholding of their labour power, or constitutional reforms.
