Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 115.djvu/45

property an institution which serves to stimulate production; to create an automatic adjustment of industrial resources to social needs; to develop the best energies of men; to create independence of character. This is a true view of some forms of property, but not of all. It is not true of the property which yields its fruits to men who have only to hold forth their hands to receive them. The Socialist sees in private property only a device whereby those who are idle may share in the gains of social production. This is a true view of a part of property, but not of that part which requires the constant vigilance and expert skill of the owner. By the plan here proposed, the system of private enterprise would surrender to Cæsar the things which are properly Cæsar's, and would be vastly strengthened thereby.

'Would you rather I wrote you what I am doing here or who I am loving there?' asked Emily Dickinson in a letter from Washington, where, as a girl, she went with her father during his Congressional term. And we who knew her best wish that she could write us now what she is 'doing there,' confident of her unique fitness to be the scribe of immortality.

Her letters and notes to her brother's family, sacredly hoarded by them and denied publication, contain numberless phrases of universal truth, written as they were a lifetime ago by this shy recluse in her retired New England home, intrenched by lilacs and guarded by bumble-bees.

Though she dwelt only 'a hedge away,' as she put it, from our own home, with but a grass lawn between, crossed by a ribbon path, 'just wide enough for two who love,' she had the habit of sending her thoughts to us as other people would have spoken them. The gambol of her mind on paper was her pastime. Though never an invalid until the last two years of her life, she did not care to go beyond her own dooryard and garden, finding infinity in the horizon of her own soul. But she had her finger on the pulse of events and noted chosen phenomena unerringly for us, with her own comment. Through the medium of these written messages she spoke across the grass to us, entrusting them to a servant, a friend, one of us or one of them, as might happen. Whenever stirred, by whatever cause, she trapped her mood, then