avored handful parasitic on the rest, they are
smitten with the degeneracy which seems to be the inevitable biological
penalty of complete parasitism, and corrupt culture and statecraft
instead of contributing to them, their excessive leisure being as
mischievous as the excessive toil of the laborers. Anyhow, the moral
is clear. The two main problems of organized society, how to secure the
subsistence of all its members, and how to prevent the theft of that
subsistence by idlers, should be entirely dissociated; and the practical
failure of one of them to automatically achieve the other recognized
and acted on. We may not all have Jesus's psychological power of seeing,
without any enlightenment from more modern economic phenomena, that they
must fail; but we have the hard fact before us that they do fail. The
only people who cling to the lazy delusion that it is possible to find
a just distribution that will work automatically are those who postulate
some revolutionary change like land nationalization, which by itself
would obviously only force into greater urgency the problem of how to
distribute the product of the land among all the individuals in the
community.

EQUAL DISTRIBUTION.

When that problem is at last faced, the question of the proportion in
which the national income shall be distributed can have only one answer.
All our shares must be equal. It has always been so; it always will
be so. It is true that the incomes of robbers vary considerably from
individual to individual; and the variation is reflected in the incomes
of their parasites. The commercialization of certain exceptional talents
has also produced exceptional incomes, direct and derivative. Persons
who live on rent of land and capital are economically, though not
legally, in the category of robbers, and have grotesquely different
incomes. But in the huge mass of mankind variation Of income from
individual to individual is unknown, because it is ridiculously
impracticable. As a device for persuading a carpenter that a judge is a
creature of superior nature to himself, to be deferred and submitted to
even to the death, we may give a carpenter a hundred pounds a year and a
judge five thousand; but the wage for one carpenter is the wage for
all the carpenters: the salary for one judge is the salary for all the
judges.

THE CAPTAIN AND THE CABIN BOY.

Nothing, therefore, is really in question, or ever has been, but the
differences betwe