d country to-day should not
be guaranteed by the community an equal opportunity in public education
and an _equal chance for promotion in the public or semi-public
service_, which soon promises to employ a large part if not the majority
of the community. _No Socialist can see any reason for continuing a
single day the process of fastening the burdens of the future society
beforehand on the children of the present generation of wage earners_,
children as yet of entirely unknown and undeveloped powers and not yet
irremediably shaped to serve in the subordinate roles filled by their
parents.

But the reformers other than the Socialists are not even working in this
direction, and their claims that they are, can easily be disproved. Mr.
John A. Hobson, for example, believes that the present British
government is seeking to realize "equality of opportunity," which he
defines as the effort "to give equal opportunities to all parts of the
country and all classes of the people, and so to develop in the fullest
and the farthest-sighted way the national resources."[85] But even the
more or less democratic collectivism Mr. Hobson and other British
Radicals advocate, if it stops short of a certain point, and its
benefits go chiefly to the middle classes, may merely increase
middle-class competition for better-paid positions, and so obviously
_decrease_ the _relative_ opportunities of the masses, and make them
_less equal_ than they are to-day.

Edward Bernstein, the Socialist, says: "The number of the possessing
classes is to-day not smaller, but larger. The enormous increase of
social wealth is not accompanied by a decreasing number of large
capitalists, but by an increasing number of capitalists of all degrees."
Whether this is true or not, whether the well-to-do middle classes are
gradually increasing in each generation, say, to 5, 10, or 15 per cent
of the population, cannot be a matter of more than secondary importance
to the overwhelming majority, the "non-possessing classes," that remain
outside. Nobody denies that social evolution is going on even to-day.
But the masses will probably not be willing to wait the necessary
generations and centuries before present tendencies, should they chance
to continue long enough (which is doubtful in view of the rapid
formation of social castes), would bring the masses any considerable
share of existing prosperity.

To secure anything approaching equality of opportunity, the first and