r, as of the earlier
socialists, is equally true of their subsidiary arguments also, from
those which refer to the generalisations of the sociologists of the
nineteenth century, and base themselves on the confusion between
speculative truth and practical, down to those which are drawn from the
absurd psychological supposition that all motives are interchangeable,
and that those which actuate the artist, the anchorite, and the soldier
can be made to replace by means of a vote or a sermon those which at
present actuate the masters of industrial enterprise. On whatever
argumentative point the socialists, as socialists, lay stress, there,
under one form or another, their root-fallacy reappears. In short, their
arguments are illusionary in proportion as they themselves value them.
And in this there is nothing wonderful. The more logically and
ingeniously men reason from premises, of which the one most essential to
their conclusions is radically false to fact, the more punctually on
every critical occasion is this fallacy bound to reassert itself as the
logical basis of that which they desire to prove.

The question, however, still remains to be answered of why a large body
of men, like the educated apostles of socialism, who exhibit as a class
no typical inferiority of intellect, unite in accepting, as though drawn
to it by some chemical affinity, one particular error which
dispassionate common-sense disdains, and which the actual history of the
whole human race refutes? In the case of some preachers of socialism the
answer lies on the surface. Socialism is of all creeds that which it is
easiest to present to the ignorant; and in these days, like "patriotism"
in the days of Dr. Johnson, it is often "the last refuge of a
scoundrel," or of a desperate and ambitious fool. But I here put such
cases altogether aside. What I here have in view are men who are morally
and intellectually honest, and many of whom, indeed, are intellectually
above the average. How is the affinity for one common error, and the
passionate promulgation of it in forms, many of which are conflicting,
to be accounted for in the case of men like these?

The answer to this is to be found, not in their intellect, but in their
temperament. It is a well-known fact that men, otherwise of high
capacity, are incapable of mastering any but the humblest branches of
mathematics. With the men who become socialists the case is closely
similar. Just as certain men are in