e which the argument thus put forward by Mr.
Webb and other socialists betrays. It will be enough to point out that,
if it applies to the monopolists of business ability, it applies with
equal force to all other sorts of men whatever. If it is to society as a
whole that the able man owes his energy, his talents, and the products
of them, it is to society as a whole that the idle man owes his
idleness, the stupid man his stupidity, and the dishonest man his
dishonesty; and if the able man, who produces an exceptional amount of
wealth, can with justice claim no more than the average man who produces
little, the man who is so idle that he shirks producing anything may
with equal justice claim as much wealth as either. His constitutional
fault, and his constitutional disinclination to mend it, are both of
them due to society, and society, not he, must suffer.

If we attempted to organise a community in accordance with such a
conclusion as this, we should be getting rid of all connection between
conduct and the natural results of it, and divorcing action from motive
altogether. Such is the conclusion to which Mr. Webb's argument would
lead us; and the absurdity of the argument, as applied by him to moral
claims and merits, though more self-evident, is not any more complete
than the absurdity of similar arguments as applied to the individual
generally in respect of his productive powers, and the amount of
produce produced by them. The whole conception, in short, of the
individual as merged in the aggregate has no relation to practical life
whatever. For the practical man the individual is always a unit; and it
is only as a unit that it is possible practically to deal with him. We
may change him in some respects by changing his general conditions, as
we hope to do by legislation which aims at the diminution of
drunkenness; but a change in general conditions, if it diminished
drunkenness generally, would do so only because it affected at the same
time the isolated minds and organisms of a number of individual
drunkards.

And to do Mr. Webb and his brother socialists justice, they
unconsciously admit all this themselves; for, as soon as they set
themselves to discuss the motives of the able man in detail, they
altogether abandon the irrelevancies of speculative sociology with which
they manage at other times to bemuse themselves. That such is the case
we shall see in the following chapter. I will, however, anticipate what
we s