us tasks of life, its original
simplicity is lost, and it does not become even intelligible until we
divest it of a large part of its implications. Economic or industrial
opportunity is, we have seen, of three kinds: firstly, educational
opportunity; secondly, the opportunity of performing and receiving the
full equivalent of an ordinary task or service, such as that of a
postman, the value of which depends on its conformity to a prescribed
pattern or schedule; and thirdly, opportunity of directing the work of
others, thereby initiating new enterprises or realising new
inventions--a kind of opportunity requiring the control of capital,
which capital, whether provided by the state or otherwise, would be lost
to the community unless it were used efficiently.

With regard to educational opportunity--it has been seen that it is
possible to equalise this, approximately if not entirely, at a given
time in the early lives of all, but that it would be possible to
maintain the equality for a short time only.

With regard to opportunities of earning a livelihood subsequently by
performing one or other of those ordinary and innumerable tasks which
must always fall to the lot of four men out of every five, we may say
that an equalisation of opportunities of this kind is the admitted
object of every reformer and statesman who believes that the prosperity
of a country is synonymous with the welfare of its inhabitants. In
achieving this object there are, however, two difficulties--one being
the difficulty, occasional and often frequent in any complex society, of
devising work which has any practical value, and replaces its own cost,
for all those who are able and willing to perform it; the other being
the difficulty which arises from the existence of persons who are
incapacitated, by some species of vice, from performing, or from
performing adequately, any useful work whatever. We must here content
ourselves with observing that the official directors of industry, who
would constitute the state under socialism, would be no more competent
to solve the first than are the private employers of to-day, while there
is nothing in the scheme of society put forward by socialists, which
even purports to supply any solution of the second, other than a more
drastic application of the methods applied to-day.

Thirdly, with regard to equality of opportunity for those whose main
ambition is not to be provided with some task-work performable by thei