l them, rather, the Haves
and the Have-nots. I don't mean with regard to money particularly, though
that comes in. But it's an all-round, thing. It's an undoubted fact,
and one there's no getting round, that some people are born with the
acquiring faculty, and others with the losing. Most of us, of course, are
in the half-way house, and win and lose in fairly average proportions.
But some of us seem marked out either for the one or for the other. I
know personally a good many in both camps. Many more of the Have-nots,
though, because I prefer to cultivate their acquaintance. There's a great
deal to be done for the Haves too; they need, I fancy, all the assistance
they can get if they're not to become prosperity-rotten. The Have-Nots
haven't that danger; but they've plenty of dangers of their own; and,
well, I suppose it's a question of taste, and that I prefer them. Anyhow,
I do know a great many. People, you understand, with nothing at all that
seems to make life tolerable. Destitutes, incapables, outcasts, slaves to
their own lusts or to a grinding economic system or to some other cruelty
of fate or men. Whatever the immediate cause of their ill-fortune may be,
its underlying, fundamental cause is their own inherent faculty for
failure and loss, their incompetence to take and hold the good things of
life. You know the stale old hackneyed cry of the anti-socialists, how it
would be no use equalising conditions because each man would soon return
again to his original state. It's true in a deeper sense than they mean.
You might equalise economic conditions as much as you please, but you'd
never equalise fundamental conditions; you'd never turn the poor into the
rich, the Have-Nots into the Haves. You know I'm not a Socialist. I don't
want to see a futile attempt to throw down barriers and merge all camps
in one indeterminate army who don't know what they mean or where they're
going. I'm not a Socialist, because I don't believe in a universal
outward prosperity. I mean, I don't want it; I should have no use for it.
I'm holding no brief for the rich; I've nothing to say about them just
now; and anyhow you and I have no concern with them." Rodney pulled
himself back from the edge of a topic on which he was apt to become
readily vehement. "But Socialism isn't the way out for them any more than
it's the way out for the poor; it's got, I believe, to be by individual
renunciation that their salvation will come; by their giving up,