This writer maintains that the money rewards of ability can be determined by the opinion of the majority expressing itself through votes and statutes.
The writer's typical error. A governing body might enact any laws, but they would not be obeyed unless consonant with human nature.
Laws are obliged to conform to the propensities of human nature which it is their office to regulate.
Elaborate but unconscious admission of this fact by the writer here quoted himself.
The power of democracy in the economic sphere, its magnitude and its limits. The demands of the minority a counterpart of those of the majority.
The demand of the great wealth-producer mainly a demand for power.
Testimony of a well-known socialist to the impossibility of altering the character of individual demand by outside influence.
CHRISTIAN SOCIALISM AS A SUBSTITUTE FOR SECULAR DEMOCRACY
The meaning of Christian socialism, as restated to-day by a typical writer.
His just criticism of the fallacy underlying modern ideas of democracy. The impossibility of equalising unequal men by political means.
Christian socialism teaches, he says, that the abler men should make themselves equal to ordinary men by surrendering to them the products of their own ability, or else by abstaining from its exercise.
The author's ignorance of the nature of the modern industrial process. His idea of steel.
He confuses the production of wealth on a great scale with the acquisition of wealth when produced.
The only really productive ability which he distinctly recognises is that of the speculative inventor.
He declares that inventors never wish to profit personally by their inventions. Let the great capitalists, he says, who merely monopolise inventions, imitate the self-abnegation of the inventors, and Christian socialism will become a fact.
The confusion which reigns in the minds of sentimentalists like the author here quoted. Their inability to see complex facts and principles, in their connected integrity, as they are. Such persons herein similar to devisers of perpetual motions and systems for defeating the laws of chance at a roulette-table.
All logical socialistic conclusions drawn from premises in which some vital truth or principle is omitted. Omission in the premises of the earlier socialists. Corresponding omission in the premises of the socialists of to-day.