In the second place, in order to justify the retention of the seventh commandment as it stands in the Book of Common Prayer, it must be shown that it is impossible to revise it and still keep it effective in compass and form. But such is not the case. The commandment could easily be enlarged and yet be kept much shorter than several of the others.

But not only is the seventh commandment inefficient because merely legal; it is inefficient because it condemns only the outward act and does not throw its censure inward upon those intentions and purposes, prompted by appetite, which almost inevitably, if entertained, lead to acts which an enlightened social conscience must condemn. Although such a censure of the inward motives which incite to immoral acts is not wholly lacking in the Ten Commandments, it is, however, misplaced: we find it in the tenth commandment. Yet when the Decalogue is being revised, surely there must be a bringing over into the seventh commandment of the injunction "Thou shalt not desire thy neighbour's wife"; or if exactly this formula be not attached to the prohibition "Thou shalt not commit adultery," the only reason for not doing so must be that it also has been found inadequate. And it will be seen upon scrutiny to share the same deficiency which renders the wording of the seventh commandment inadequate. The injunction "Thou shalt not desire thy neighbour's wife" is again a moral commandment cast into a merely legal and therefore cramping mould. One's neighbour's wife is not the only person whom one must not desire. In the first place, we note in this injunction the implication that the commandment is for men only, as if there were no occasion that any word should be said to women. It is quite possible that when it was formulated, women had so little individuality and were allowed so little liberty

that it never entered the mind of law-givers to keep them moral except by the alert oversight of the husband, the pressure of public opinion, and the fear of being detected. It is also possible that the nature of women was so little understood that their conventional propriety was interpreted as passivity or neutrality, and that therefore no occasion was felt for the injunction "Thou shalt not desire thy neighbour's husband." But such an interpretation of woman is not true, nor is it even an honour to her. For passivity in and of itself is no more beneficent or pure than positive desire and the expression of it, provided the desire be in degree and under conditions not deleterious to society. The seventh commandment, then, must not only have incorporated in it the first injunction of the tenth commandment, but that injunction itself must be made unequivocally to apply to women as well as to men, and to the unmarried as well as to the married. Such a revision would be achieved if instead of "Thou shalt not desire thy neighbour's wife" the injunction stood, "Thou shalt not desire anyone whom, for the sake of the common life, thou shouldst not have." Were this to be incorporated into the seventh commandment, the whole might be made to read, "Thou shalt not commit adultery; neither shalt thou even so much as desire anyone whom, for the sake of the common life, thou shouldst not have."

8. The eighth commandment is defective, and therefore inefficient, in the same way as the seventh. In the first place, stealing is only a legal term. Until the government of a State has by legislation stamped an act as theft, it is not theft. But many a withholding of wealth from another, and many a taking of property from another, although not branded by law as a crime, is gravely pernicious, causes untold suffering throughout

a nation, and is altogether anti-social and disintegrating to humanity in its effects.

In all nations the laws of property fall shockingly short of what the enlightened social conscience to-day is demanding. Thousands of acts ought to be stamped as stealing which have not yet been placed under legal censure. Were this done, tens of thousands of persons who now not only go scot free, but receive social homage and moral deference, would be branded as thieves. But until the government of the State actually condemns an act as theft, it is a rhetorical licence to anticipate such a condemnation by so denominating the act. The word should be kept as a legal term; and those and those persons who extend its meaning, instead of enlarging the insight of those who do not yet understand the ethics of property, only offend and harden the prejudices of the rich and the unthinkingly conservative.

My personal judgment is that what the law has laid down as the rights of property must be so respected. The law may be outrageously unjust, but the protest against injustice, at least where constitutional procedure is possible, must not take the form of a self-interested breaking of the law. On the contrary, those who would reform it must the more scrupulously obey it, in order that by agitation and organisation, unvitiated by any evidence of lawlessness or of a personal grievance embittering them, they may convert the majority of the nation to their own sense of the injustice of the existing legal practice. The eighth commandment as it stands, therefore, is in so far good; but it must proceed to indicate the whole duty of ownership. The most enlightened social conscience of our day sees plainly that it is a wrong against society for anyone to take from others, although not legally prohibited, what the welfare of the com

munity requires that those others should have. But it sees still further. It is not only the active and aggressive taking that the disinterested judgment of men to-day condemns; under its censure falls also the passive retention of any forms of wealth, of any kinds of the means of health, happiness and social efficiency, which the welfare of the community requires that others should have.

Let it be noted that such a statement as this does not place the test of the right to any wealth on the part of any person as many individualists and anarchists would have it—in the mere fact that that person wants it, or even in the fact that he individually is in dire need of it. A man may want and may need a thing, and yet for him to possess it may be against the welfare of organised society of the majority of individuals and, in the long run, of all. We need a formula which shall plainly set the lasting welfare of the nation above either the wants or the needs of the individual. This is not only the ultimate judgment of the enlightened conscience of our day as to what ought to be; it is also in fact the actual theory and philosophy of legislation in all civilised States. Nay, more, it is the actual practice of all civilised States in great crises when the existence of the nation itself is at stake, or when public opinion is fully aroused and decisive as to the common benefit which would accrue from the taking over by the State of any property hitherto privately owned.

But the public in general is extremely and dangerously ignorant as to the philosophy of legal property, the practice of governments and the judgment of conscience. This ignorance would be removed in one generation if the Decalogue, which was required to be learnt by heart by every child and repeated in all religious assemblies at

frequent intervals, condemned not only stealing but all anti-social taking or retention of wealth. If the eighth commandment read, "Thou shalt not steal; neither shalt thou take or keep from another anything which the social welfare requires that he should possess,' then it would unequivocally extend its prohibition beyond the narrow limits of such anti-social ownership as political enactment had already forbidden under penalties.

9. The injunction "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour," like the three preceding ones, is pedagogically defective. The specification of this one particular form of deception, although it be the worst form, is in danger of seeming to imply that other forms, in which no false witness against a neighbour is perpetrated, do not come under the censure of the prohibition. The ninth commandment is also defective, like the eighth, in that it is too exclusively legal; for undoubtedly the false witness against a neighbour refers to testimony, if not before a court, at least before a recognised judge, and possibly under oath. To do adequately its work of moral instruction and edification, the commandment should be so recast as to stigmatise unequivocally the whole brood of lies. For undoubtedly all misrepresentation of facts tends in the first place to weaken the love and the delicate sense of truthfulness; and, in the second place, only false statements so insignificant that they are not worth making, or so palpably false that they do not constitute real deception, can be uttered without weakening mutual confidence and trust, neighbourly love and the zest of spiritual fellowship.

The ninth commandment is inadequate in another way; the prohibition against bearing false witness