should have full shares of the good things of life. These two
ideals inevitably combine into a third--that all men should produce full
shares of the good things of life. But the plain fact is that they
cannot--that no amount of opportunity or appliances will enable the
average day laborer to produce what Mr. Edison or Mr. Hill or even the
average deviser of work and guide of labor does. Then even ideal ethics
cannot say in this actual world: Let both have the same. That would simply
be Robin Hood ethics: rob the man who produces much, and give the plunder
to the man who produces little. Hence comes the disguising of the schemes
to do it, even so that they often deceive their own devisers. What then do
practical ethics say? They can't say anything more than: Help the less
capable to become capable, so that he may produce more. But that is at
least as slow a process as raising the servant beyond the stage of tips.
Meantime the socialists are unwilling to wait, and propose to rob the
present owners of the means of production, and take the control of
industry from the men who manage it now, and put it in the hands of the
men who merely can influence votes. These men certainly are no less
selfish and dishonest than the captains of industry, and are vastly less
able to select the profitable fields of industry, and organize and
economize industry; whatever product they might squeeze out would be
vastly less than now, and it would stick to their own fingers no less than
does what the politicians handle now. Dividing whatever might reach the
people, without reference to those who produced it, could yield the
average man no more than he gets now. That's very simple mathematics. One
of the saddest sights of the day is the number of good people to whom
these facts are not self-evident.

In no state of human nature that any persons now living, or the grandchild
of any person now living, will witness, could such conditions be
permanent. Their temporary realization might be accomplished; but if it
were, the able men would not be satisfied with either the low grade of
civilization inevitable unless they worked, or with being robbed of the
large share of production that must result from their work. The more
intelligent of the rank and file, too, would rebel against the conditions
inevitably lowering the general prosperity, and they would soon realize
the difference in industrial leadership between "political generals" and
natural genera