ndants for the children of these men? Make things
beautiful, make things abundant, make life glorious! Fools! if you
work and sacrifice yourselves and do not _get_, they will possess.
Your sons shall be the loan-monger's employees, your daughters
handmaidens to the millionaire. Or, if you cannot face that, go
childless, and let your life-work gild the palace of the millionaire's
still more acquisitive descendants!"

Who can ignore the base scramble for money under these alternatives?

Sec. 4.

Let me here insert a very brief paragraph to point out one particular
thing, and that is that Socialism does not propose to "abolish
competition"--as many hasty and foolish antagonists declare. If the
reader has gone through what has preceded this he will know that this
is not so. Socialism trusts to competition, looks to competition for
the service and improvement of the world. And in order that
competition between man and man may have free play, Socialism seeks to
abolish one particular form of competition, the competition to get and
hold property--even to marry property, that degrades our present
world. But it would leave men free to compete for fame, for service,
for salaries, for position and authority, for leisure, for love and
honour.

Sec. 5.

And now let me take up certain difficulties the student of Socialism
encounters. He comes thus far perhaps with the Socialist argument, and
then his imagination gets to work trying to picture a world in which a
moiety of the population, perhaps even the larger moiety, is employed
by the State, and in which the whole population is educated by the
State and insured of a decent and comfortable care and subsistence
during youth and old age. He then begins to think of how all this vast
organization is to be managed, and with that his real difficulties
begin.

Now I for one am prepared to take these difficulties very seriously,
as the latter part of this book will show. I will even go so far as to
say that, to my mind, the contemporary Socialist controversialist
meets all this system of objections far too cavalierly. These
difficulties are real difficulties for the convinced Socialist as for
the inquirer; they open up problems that have still to be solved
before the equipment of Socialism is complete. "How will you
Socialists get the right men in the right place for the work that has
to be done? How will you arrange promotion? How will you determine" (I
put the argument in its