xpectation of "doing well." It is
only necessary to glance at the history of the past hundred years to
realize that "agitation" has provided a pleasant and remunerative career
for hundreds of middle-class authors, journalists, speakers, organizers,
and dilettantes of all kinds who would otherwise have been condemned to
pass their lives on office-stools or at schoolmasters' desks. And when
we read the accounts of the delightful treats provided for these
"devoted workers" in the cause of the proletariat as given in the
records of the First Internationale or the pages of Mrs. Snowden, we
begin to understand the attractions of Socialism as a profession.[737]

But again I repeat: _Who provides the funds for this vast campaign_? Do
they come out of the pockets of the workers or from some other
mysterious reservoir of wealth? We shall return to this point in a later
chapter.

How is it possible at any rate to believe in the sincerity of the
exponents of equality who themselves adopt a style of living so
different from that of the proletariat whose cause they profess to
represent? If the doctrinaires of Socialism formed a band of ascetics
who had voluntarily renounced luxury and amusement in order to lead
lives of poverty and self-sacrifice--as countless really devoted men and
women _not_ calling themselves Socialists have done--we should still
doubt the soundness of their economic theories as applied to society in
general, but we should respect their disinterestedness. But with very
few exceptions Socialist Intellectuals dine and sup, feast and amuse
themselves with as few scruples of conscience as any unregenerate
Tories.

With people such as these it is obviously as futile to reason, as it
would be to attempt to convince the agent of a quack medicine company
that the nostrums he presses on the public will not effect a cure. He is
very well aware of that already. Hence the efforts of well-meaning
people to set forth in long, well-reasoned arguments the "fallacies of
Socialism" produce little or no result. All these so-called "fallacies"
have been exposed repeatedly by able writers and disproved by all
experience, so that if based merely on ignorance or error they would
long since have ceased to obtain credence. The truth is that they are
not fallacies but lies, deliberately devised and circulated by men who
do not believe in them for a moment and who can therefore only be
described as unscrupulous charlatans exploiting the