atural
rewards of the great producers of wealth less desirable in their own
eyes than they are and otherwise would be.

FOOTNOTES:

[23] Mr. G. Wilshire, in his detailed criticism of my American speeches,
states twice over the modern socialistic doctrine as to this point. The
maker or inheritor of capital, he says, could, under socialism, "buy all
the automobiles he wanted, all the diamonds, all the champagne; or he
could build a palace. In other words, he could spend his income in
consumable goods, but he could not invest either in productive machinery
or in land."

[24] This is merely saying that all economic effort has, for its
ultimate aim, a desirable state of consciousness, which might be
contemptible if it really depended on looking on at dances, or refined
if it depended on the cultivation of flowers, or listening to great
singers, or witnessing the performance of great plays, or on the
enlargement of the mind by travel.

CHAPTER XV

EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY

Having now dealt with two of those three ideas or conceptions which,
though not necessarily connected with the specific doctrines of
socialism, owe much of their present diffusion to the activity of
socialistic preachers--that is to say, the idea, purely statistical,
that labour, as contrasted with the directive ability of it, actually
produces much more than it gets, and the further idea that the many
could ameliorate their own position by appropriating the interest now
received by the few; having dealt with these two ideas, it remains for
us to consider the third--namely, that which is generally suggested by
the formula Equality of Opportunity, or, more particularly (for this is
what concerns us here), equality of opportunity in the domain of
economic production.

We must start with recollecting that if the wealth of a country depends
mainly, as we have here seen that it does, on the efforts of those of
its citizens whose industrial talent is the greatest, the more
effectively all such talent is provided with an opportunity of exerting
itself the greater will the wealth and prosperity of that country be. In
other words, if potential talent is to be actualised, opportunity is as
needful for its exercise as is the stimulus of a proportionate reward.
That economic opportunity ought, therefore, to be equalised, so far as
possible, is, as an abstract principle, too obvious to need
demonstration. But abstract principles are useless till we apply