question how one kind
of labor can be measured against another, how the labor of the artisan
can be measured against the labor of the artist, how the labor of the
strong can be measured against the labor of the weak, the communists
can give no answer. Absorbed, as they are, in the principle of equality,
they have still forgotten the equality of work in the equality of
pay; they have forgotten that reward, to be really equal, must be
proportionate to effort; and they and all socialists have forgotten that
we cannot make an arithmetic of human thought and feeling; and that for
all our crude attempts to balance recompense against toil, for all our
crude attempts to determine the relative severity of different kinds
of toil, for all our crude attempts to determine the relative strain on
different persons of the same kind of toil, yet not only will the ratio,
dealing, as it does, with our subjective feelings, be a blundering one,
but a system based upon it will involve inequalities greater, because
more insidious, than those of the present system it would discard.

Instances, indeed, are not wanting to substantiate the claim that
communism, by unduly exalting our altruistic impulses, proceeds upon a
false psychological basis. Yet if an instance is to be chosen, it would
be hard to find one more suggestive than that afforded by the efforts
of Robert Owen. The year 1824 saw the rise of Owen's little community of
New Harmony, and the year of 1828 saw the community's final disruption.
Individuals had appropriated to themselves the property designed for
all; and even Owen, who had given to the enterprise his money and
his life, was obliged to admit that men were not yet fitted for the
communistic stage, and that the moment of transition from individualism
to communism had not yet arrived. Men trained under the old system, with
its eager rivalry, its selfish interests, could not quite yet enter
into the spirit of self-renunciation that communism demands. And Owen,
therefore, was led to put his trust in education as the great moulder of
the minds of men. Through this agency, he hoped, the eager rivalry, the
selfish interests, the sordid love of gain, might be lost in higher,
purer, more disinterested ends; and, animated by that hope-the hope that
in the fullness of time another New Harmony, free from contention and
the disappointments of the old one, might serve to immortalize his
name-animated by that hope, Owen passed the last thi