thus far produced among the masses has been to foment the
impression, which is not the less efficacious because it is not
explicitly formulated, that when labour and ability are disputing over
their respective rights, ability comes into court with no genuine rights
at all; and that, instead of representing (as it does) the knowledge,
intellect, and energy to which the whole surplus values of the modern
world are due, it represents merely a system of decently legalised theft
from an output of wealth which would lose nothing of its amplitude, but
would on the contrary still continue to increase were all exceptional
energy, knowledge, and intellect deprived of all authority and starved
out of existence to-morrow.

So long as such an impression prevails, and indeed until it is
definitely superseded by one more in consonance with facts, no
satisfactory social policy is practicable. Labour, as opposed to
ability, may be compared to a man who believes that his tailor has
overcharged him for a coat, and who disputes the account in a law court
with a view to its reasonable reduction. In such a case it will be
possible for him to obtain justice. The tailor's claim for L12 may be
reduced to a claim for L10, or L8 5_s._, or L6 15_s._ 6_d._ But if the
customer's contention is that he ought to get the coat for nothing, and
that he does not in justice owe the tailor anything at all, he is making
a demand that no law court could satisfy, and by a gratuitous
misconception of his rights is doing all he can to preclude himself from
any chance of obtaining them. The mood which socialism foments among the
labouring classes is precisely analogous to the mood of such a man as
this, and its results are analogous likewise. Its origin, however, being
artificial and also obvious in its minutest particulars, the remedy for
it, however difficult to apply, is not obscure in its nature. The mood
in question results from a definite, a systematic, and an artificially
produced misconception of the structure and the main phenomena, good and
evil, of society as it exists to-day, and the different parts played by
the different classes composing it. It has been the object of the
present volume to expose, one after another, the individual fallacies of
which this general misconception is the result, not with a view to
suggesting that in society as it exists to-day there are no grave evils
which a true social policy may alleviate, but with a view to promoting