motional appeal is made
and the misery of the workmen's fate is shown up. There is no
unhappier lot than that of those healthy men who can work and want to
work, and do not find a chance to work. But this tremendous problem of
the unemployed is not organically connected with the struggle about
socialism. As far as social organization and human foresight can ever
be able to overcome this disease of the industrial body, the remedies
can just as well be applied in the midst of full-fledged capitalism.
It is quite true that the misfortune of unemployment may never be
completely uprooted, but vast improvements can easily be conceived
without any economic revolution; and, above all, no scheme has been
proposed by the socialists which would offer more. As long as there is
a market with its ups and downs, as long as harvests vary and social
depressions occur, there will be those who have no chance for their
usual useful activity. If the community of the socialistic state
supports them, it will do no more than the capitalistic state will
surely do very soon, too. If we want to see clean issues, we ought to
rule out the problem of unemployment entirely.

The socialistic hope can be only that, through the abolition of
capital, the average workman will get a richer share from the fruits
of his industrial labour. In the programmes of the American socialists
it has taken the neat round figure that every workingman ought to
live on the standard of five thousand dollars yearly income. Of course
the five thousand dollars themselves are not an end, but only a means
to it. The end is happiness, and here alone begins the psychologist's
interest. He does not discuss whether the five-thousand-dollar
standard as minimum wage can really be expected. He asks himself only
whether the goal can be reached, whether such a socialistic society
would really secure a larger amount of human happiness. It is here
that he answers that this claim is a psychological illusion. If we
seek socialism for its external achievement we must recognize that it
is a failure; if we seek it for its internal result, joy and
happiness, it must be worse than a failure. The psychology of feeling
is still the least developed part of our modern science of
consciousness, but certain chief facts are acknowledged on all sides,
and in their centre stands the law of the relativity of feeling.
Satisfaction and dissatisfaction, content and discontent, happiness
and unhappiness, do