wrong road, and encumbering them.  Indeed, so completely has man’s personality been absorbed by his possessions that the English law has always treated offences against a man’s property with far more severity than offences against his person, and property is still the test of complete citizenship.  The industry necessary for the making money is also very demoralising.  In a community like ours, where property confers immense distinction, social position, honour, respect, titles, and other pleasant things of the kind, man, being naturally ambitious, makes it his aim to accumulate this property, and goes on wearily and tediously accumulating it long after he has got far more than he wants, or can use, or enjoy, or perhaps even know of.  Man will kill himself by overwork in order to secure property, and really, considering the enormous advantages that property brings, one is hardly surprised.  One’s regret is that society should be constructed on such a basis that man has been forced into a groove in which he cannot freely develop what is wonderful, and fascinating, and delightful in him—in which, in fact, he misses the true pleasure and joy of living.  He is also, under existing conditions, very insecure.  An enormously wealthy merchant may be—often is—at every moment of his life at the mercy of things that are not under his control.  If the wind blows an extra point or so, or the weather suddenly changes, or some trivial thing happens, his ship may go down, his speculations may go wrong, and he finds himself a poor man, with his social position quite gone.  Now, nothing should be able to harm a man except himself.  Nothing should be able to rob a man at all.  What a man really has, is what is in him.  What is outside of him should be a matter of no importance.

With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism.  Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things.  One will live.  To live is the rarest thing in the world.  Most people exist, that is all.

It is a question whether we have ever seen the full expression of a personality, except on the imaginative plane of art.  In action, we never have.  Cæsar, says Mommsen, was the complete and perfect man.  But how tragically insecure was Cæsar!  Wherever there is a man who exercises authority, there is a man who resists authority.  Cæsar was very perfect, but his perfection travelled by too dangerous a road.  Marcus Aurelius was the perfect man, says Renan.  Yes; the great emperor was a perfect man.  But how intolerable were the endless claims upon him!  He staggered under the burden of the empire.  He was conscious how inadequate one man was to bear the weight of that Titan and too vast orb.  What I mean by a perfect man is one who develops under perfect conditions; one who is not wounded, or worried or maimed, or in danger.  Most personalities have been obliged to be rebels.  Half their strength has been wasted in friction.  Byron’s personality, for instance, was terribly wasted in its battle with the stupidity, and hypocrisy, and Philistinism of the English.  Such battles do not always intensify strength: they often exaggerate weakness.  Byron was never able to give us what he might have given us.  Shelley escaped better.  Like Byron, he got out of England as soon as possible.  But he was not so well known.  If the English had had any idea of what a great poet he really was, they would have fallen on him with tooth and nail, and made his life as unbearable to him as they possibly could.  But he was not a remarkable figure in society, and consequently he escaped, to a certain degree.  Still, even in Shelley the note of rebellion is sometimes too strong.  The note of the perfect personality is not rebellion, but peace.

It will be a marvellous thing—the true personality of man—when we see it.  It will grow naturally and simply, flowerlike, or as a tree grows.  It will not be at discord.  It will never argue or dispute.  It will not prove things.  It will know everything.  And yet it will not busy itself about knowledge.  It will have wisdom.  Its value will not be measured by material things.  It will have nothing.  And yet it will have everything, and whatever one takes from it, it will still have, so rich will it be.  It will not be always meddling with others, or asking them to be like itself.  It will love them because they will be different.  And yet while it will not meddle with others, it will help all, as a beautiful thing helps us, by being what it is.  The personality of man will be very wonderful.  It will be as wonderful as the personality of a child.

In its development it will be assisted by Christianity, if men desire that; but if men do not desire that, it will develop none the less surely.  For it will not worry itself about the past, nor care whether things happened or did not happen.  Nor will it admit any laws but its own laws; nor any authority but its own authority.  Yet it will love those who sought to intensify it, and speak often of them.  And of these Christ was one.

‘Know thyself’ was written over the portal of the antique world.  Over the portal of the new world, ‘Be thyself’ shall be written.  And the message of Christ to man was simply ‘Be thyself.’  That is the secret of Christ.

When Jesus talks about the poor he simply means personalities, just as when he talks about the rich he simply means people who have not developed their personalities.  Jesus moved in a community that allowed the accumulation of private property just as ours does, and the gospel that he preached was not that in such a community it is an advantage for a man to live on scanty, unwholesome food, to wear ragged, unwholesome clothes, to sleep in horrid, unwholesome dwellings, and a disadvantage for a man to live under healthy, pleasant, and decent conditions.  Such a view would have been wrong there and then, and would, of course, be still more wrong now and in England; for as man moves northward the material necessities of life become of more vital importance, and our society is infinitely more complex, and displays far greater extremes of luxury and pauperism than any society of the antique world.  What Jesus meant, was this.  He said to man, ‘You have a wonderful personality.  Develop it.  Be yourself.  Don’t imagine that your perfection lies in accumulating or possessing external things.  Your affection is inside of you.  If only you could realise that, you would not want to be rich.  Ordinary riches can be stolen from a man.  Real riches cannot.  In the treasury-house of your soul, there are infinitely precious things, that may not be taken from you.  And so, try to so shape your life that external things will not harm you.  And try also to get rid of personal property.  It involves sordid preoccupation, endless industry, continual wrong.  Personal property hinders Individualism at every step.’  It is to be noted that Jesus never says that impoverished people are necessarily good, or wealthy people necessarily bad.  That would not have been true.  Wealthy people are, as a class, better than impoverished people, more moral, more intellectual, more well-behaved.  There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor.  The poor can think of nothing else.  That is the