1 7 4 ARISTO CRA CY AND E VOL UTION 



Book ii the realised process of the more efficient members of 

 the human race controlling and guiding the less 

 efficient ; capitalistic competition is the means by 



for capitalistic which, out of these more efficient members, society 

 itself selects those who serve it best ; and no society 

 which intends to remain civilised, and is not prepared 

 to return to the direct coercion of slavery, can 

 escape from competition and the wage-system, under 

 some form or other, any more than it can stand in 

 its own shadow. 



With regard, then, to economic production, which, 

 of all social activities, is for the practical sociologist 

 incomparably the most important, what we have 

 thus far seen is as follows. We have seen, not that 

 it is impossible for this question has been expressly 

 postponed that men may be made far more equal 

 than they are now in respect of the possession of 

 wealth ; but that whatever degree of equality they 

 may some day attain to in its possession, they can 

 never be otherwise than unequal in the parts played 



The industrial by them in its production ; that their inequality in 



obedience of , . .-,,.. - 



the many to productive power is ot such 3. kind as to render the 



industrial obedience of the larger number of them to 

 the minority the primary and permanent condition 

 on which economic progress is possible ; that what 

 feather-brained fanatics call " economic freedom " 

 would be merely another name for economic help- 

 lessness ; and that all the democratic formulas which 

 for the past hundred years have represented the 

 employed as the producers of wealth, and the capi- 

 talistic employers as the appropriators of it, are, 



