omplete the course.

The expense of a superior education, including upkeep during the
increasing number of years required, is rising many times more rapidly
than the income of the average man. At the same time, both the wealth
and the numbers of the well-to-do are increasing in greater proportion
than those of the rest of the people. While the better places get
farther and farther out of the reach of the children of the masses,
owing to the overcrowding of the professions by children of the
well-to-do, the competition becomes ever keener, and the poor boy or
girl who must struggle not only against this excessive competition, but
also against his economic handicap, confronts an almost superhuman task.

It is obvious that this tendency cannot be reversed, no matter how
rapidly the people's income is increased, unless it rises _more rapidly_
than that of the well-to-do. And this, Socialists believe, has never
happened except when the masses obtained political power and made full
use of it _against_ the class in control of industry and government.

No amount of material progress and no reorganization of industry or
government which does not promise to equalize opportunity,--however
rapid or even sensational it may be,--is of the first moment to the
Socialists of the movement. Wages might increase 5 or 10 per cent every
year, as profits increase to-day; hours might be shortened and the
intensity of labor lessened; and yet the gulf between the classes might
be growing wider than ever. If society is to progress toward industrial
democracy, it is necessary that the people should fix their attention,
not merely on the improvement of their own condition, but on their
progress _when compared with that of the capitalist classes, i.e._ when
measured by present-day civilization and the possibilities it affords.

_No matter how fast wages increase, if profits increase faster, we are
journeying not towards social democracy, but towards a caste society._
Thus to insist that we must keep our eyes on the prosperity of others in
order to measure our own seems like preaching envy or class hatred. But
in social questions the laws of individual morality are often reversed.
It is _the social duty_ of every less prosperous class of citizens,
their duty towards the whole of the coming generation as well as to
their own children, to measure their own progress solely by a standard
raised in accordance with the point in evolution that society has