ty might decide, if it pleased, that the amount of
work to be exacted should be that which would be just enough to provide
the simplest material necessities. If, again, the indolent and
inefficient are to exist at all,--and we can scarcely count upon their
disappearance,--and if further, they are to share equally with the
industrious and the efficient, we must, in some way, coerce them into
the required activity. If every industrial organisation is to be worked
by the State, the State, it would seem, must appeal to the only means
at its disposal,--namely, the prison and the scourge. If, moreover, the
idle and sensual choose to multiply, the State must force them to
refrain, or the standard of existence will be lowered. And, therefore,
as is often argued, Socialism logically carried out would, under such
conditions, lead to slavery; to a state in which labour would be
enforced, and the whole system of life absolutely regulated by the will
of the majority; and, in the last resort, by physical force. That
seems, I confess, to be a necessary result, unless you can assume a
moral change, which is entirely different from the mere change of
machinery, and not necessarily implied, nor even made probable, by the
change. The intellectual leaders of Socialism, no doubt, assume that
the removal of "injustice" will lead to the development of a public
spirit which will cause the total efficiency to be as great as it is at
present, or perhaps greater. But the mass who call themselves
Socialists take, one suspects, a much simpler view. They are moved by
the very natural, but not especially lofty, desire to have more wages
and less work. They take for granted that if their share of the total
product is increased, they will get a larger dividend; and do not stop
to inquire whether the advantage may be not more than counterbalanced
by the diminution of the whole product, when the present incitements to
industry are removed. They argue,--that is, so far as they argue at
all,--as though the quantity to be distributed were a fixed quantity,
and regard capitalists as pernicious persons, somehow intercepting a
lion's share of the stream of wealth which, it is assumed, would flow
equally if they were abolished. That is, of course, to beg the whole
question.

I, however, shall venture to assume that the industrial machinery
requires a corresponding moral force to work it; and I, therefore,
proceed to ask how such a force can be supposed to act w