286 ARISTOCRACY AND EVOLUTION 



Book iv amount which will separate their lot from that of 

 the majority of their fellows. Now if this should 

 be really the case, as the socialists are coming to 

 perceive, the fact would be fatal to the entire ideal 

 of socialism. They are consequently now directing 

 the best of their ingenuity to showing that the 

 is the enjoy- desire of possessing exceptional wealth is altogether 



ment of excep- . 



tionai wealth superfluous as a motive for producing it, and that 

 >e to the great producers of it, when all chance of possess- 



as a m 



ing it is taken from them, will find in the pleasures 

 of the strain which the productive process neces- 

 sitates especially if these are supplemented by 

 the inexpensive thanks of the community a more 

 powerful inducement to exertion than is the prospect 

 of the largest fortune, 

 if u is so, u is Now in endeavouring to make this peculiar 



for the social- .. , . . ... , 111 r r 



ists to prove position good, it is evident that the burden of proof 

 50 ' lies with the socialists themselves ; for although the 

 doctrine that all exceptional exertions in wealth- 

 production are motived solely by an avidity for 

 exceptional wealth as such and this is the doctrine 

 which the socialists set themselves to controvert is 

 a very imperfect rendering of what their opponents 

 actually maintain, it embodies an assertion which 

 the socialists themselves declare to have been true of 

 all exceptional exertion in wealth-production hitherto. 

 No one declares this more passionately and more 

 persistently than they. For what, as political 

 agitators, has been their chief moral indictment 

 against the typical great men of industry the 

 organisers of labour, the introducers of new 



