ell as individual improvement. In any
conceivable state of things, the welfare of every society, the total
means of enjoyment at its disposal, must depend upon the energy,
intelligence, and trustworthiness of its constituent members. Such
qualities, I need hardly say, are qualities of individuals. Unless John
and Peter and Thomas are steady, industrious, sober, and honest, the
society as a whole will be neither honest nor sober nor prosperous. The
problem, then, becomes, how can you ensure the existence of such
qualities unless John and Peter and the rest have some advantage in
virtue of possessing them? Somehow or other, a man must be the better
off for doing his work well and treating his neighbour fairly. He ought
surely to hold the positions in which such qualities are most required,
and to have, if possible, the best chance of being a progenitor of the
rising generation. A social condition in which it made no difference to
a man, except so far as his own conscience was concerned, whether he
were or were not honest, would imply a society favourable to people
without a conscience, because giving full play to the forces which make
for corruption and disintegration. If you remove the rewards accessible
to the virtuous and peaceful, how are you to keep the penalties which
restrain the vicious and improvident? A bare repeal of the law, "If a
man will not work, neither shall he eat," would not of itself promote
industry. You would at most remove the compulsion which arises from
competition, to introduce the compulsion which uses physical force. You
would get rid of what seems to some people the "natural" penalty of
want following waste, and be forced to introduce the "artificial" or
legislative penalty of compulsory labour. But, otherwise, you must
construct your society so that, by the spontaneous play of society, the
purer elements may rise to the surface, and the scum sink to the
bottom. So long as human nature varies indefinitely, so long as we have
knaves and honest men, sinners and saints, cowards and heroes, some
process of energetic and active sifting is surely essential to the
preservation of social health; and it is difficult to see how that is
conceivable without some process of active and keen competition.

The Socialist will, of course, say, and say with too much truth, that
the present form of competition is favourable to anti-social qualities.
If, indeed, a capitalist is not a person who increases the produc