ists
based them, on the ground that production alone gives a valid right to
possession, labour to-day, instead of getting less than its due, is, if
we take it in the aggregate, getting incomparably more, and justice in
that case would require that the vast majority of mankind should have
its standards of living not raised but lowered.

Is it, then, the reader will here ask, the object of the present volume
to suggest that the true course of social reform in the future would be
gradually to take away from the majority some portion of what they at
present possess, and bind them down, in accordance with the teaching of
socialists in the past, to the little maximum which they could produce
by their own unaided efforts? The moral of the present volume is the
precise reverse of this. Its object is not to suggest that they should
possess no more than they produce. It is to place their claim to a
certain surplus not produced by themselves on a true instead of a
fantastic basis.

Socialists seek to base the claim in question, alternately and sometimes
simultaneously, on two grounds--one moral, the other practical--which
are alike futile and fallacious, and are also incompatible with each
other. The former consists of the _a priori_ moral doctrine that every
one has a right to what he produces, and consequently to no more. The
latter consists of an assumption that those who produce most will, in
deference to a standard of right of a wholly different kind, surrender
their own products to those who produce least. The practical assumption
is childish; and the abstract moral doctrine can only lead to a
conclusion the opposite of that which those who appeal to it desire. But
the claim in question may, when reduced to reasonable proportions, be
defended on grounds both moral and practical, nevertheless, and the
present volume aims at rendering these intelligible. Let us return for a
moment to Rousseau and his theory of the social contract. We know to-day
that never in the entire history of mankind did any such conscious
contract as Rousseau imagined take place; but it is nevertheless true
that virtually, and by ultimate implication, something like a contract
or bargain underlies the relation between classes in all states of
society.

When one man contracts to sell a horse for a certain price, and another
man to pay that price for it, the price in question is agreed to because
the buyer says to himself on the one hand, "If I do not c