re we have the conclusion of the whole
matter. These two classes are contrasted, not because in mere intellect
one is inferior to the other, but because when they are dealing with the
industrial affairs of life these affairs appeal to them in two
contrasted ways. One of these classes takes men and nature as they are.
With the utmost minuteness it masters the secrets of the latter, with
the utmost minuteness it directs the actions of the former; and in
seeking wealth for itself it brings about those conditions which alone
can make added wealth a practical possibility for all. The other class,
occupied not with what is but what ought to be, fails to understand what
can be, because it does not understand what is. The men of whom this
class is composed--the men whose temperamental deficiency now finds its
fullest expression in socialism, as it did formerly in theories of
ultra-democratic individualism, are like amateur architects, and amateur
sanitary engineers, who, thinking in pictures, and having no knowledge
of structure, condemn existing houses and existing systems of drainage,
and would replace them with palaces which no builder could build, with
arches which would collapse from the weight of their own materials, and
magnificent cloacae the waters in which would have to run uphill.

The theory, then, of socialism, let it take what form it will--the
theory which represents as practicable by one device or another the
social equalisation of economically unequal men--is a theory which, in
minds which are intellectually honest, can develop itself only in
proportion as these minds are incapable of grasping in their connected
completeness the actual facts of life; and that such is the case has
been illustrated in the preceding chapters by a systematic analysis of
all the crucial arguments on which socialists have rested their case
from the earliest day of socialistic thought to the latest.

The reader, however, must observe the manner in which this statement is
qualified. In speaking of the arguments of the socialists, I speak of
those that are crucial only--that is to say, of those arguments used by
socialistic thinkers in support of their programme in so far as that
programme is peculiar. It is necessary to note this because, as a matter
of fact, with such of their arguments as are proper to socialism only,
the philosophers of socialism and their disciples frequently associate
others which are not peculiar to the socialist