own talent industrial discoveries or
inventions, accumulate in a few years millions, can be nothing but
unscrupulous manipulators of affairs, if we except a few rare strokes
of good luck. And it is these very parasites--bankers, etc.,--who live
in the most ostentatious luxury enjoying public honors, and holding
offices of trust, as a reward for their honorable business methods.

Those who toil, the immense majority, receive barely enough food to keep
them from dying of hunger; they live in back-rooms, in garrets, in the
filthy alleys of cities, or in the country in hovels not fit for stables
for horses or cattle.

Besides all this, we must not forget the horrors of being unable to find
work, the saddest and most frequent of the three symptoms of that
_equality in misery_ which is spreading like a pestilence over the
economic world of modern Italy, as indeed, with varying degrees of
intensity, it is everywhere else.

I refer to the ever-growing army of the _unemployed_ in agriculture and
industry--of those who have lost their foothold in the lower middle
class,--and of those who have been _expropriated_ (robbed) of their
little possessions by taxes, debts or usury.

It is not correct, then, to assert that socialism demands for all
citizens material and actual equality of labor and rewards.

The only possible equality is equality of obligation to work in order to
live, with a guarantee to every laborer of conditions of existence
worthy of a human being in exchange for the labor furnished to society.

Equality, according to socialism--as Benoit Malon said[5]--is a
relative thing, and must be understood in a two-fold sense: 1st, All
men, as men, must be guaranteed human conditions of existence; 2d, All
men ought to be equal _at the starting point_, ought not to be
handicapped, in the struggle for life, in order that each may freely
develop his own personality in an environment of equality of _social_
conditions, while to-day a child, sound and healthy, but poor, goes to
the wall in competition with a child puny but rich.[6]

This is what constitutes the radical, immeasurable transformation that
socialism demands, but that it also has discovered and announces as an
evolution--already begun in the world around us--that will be
necessarily, inevitably accomplished in the human society of the days to
come.[7]

This transformation is summed up in the conversion of private or
individual ownership of the means of product