SOCIALISTS AND PRODUCTIVE IMPOTENCE 343 



distribute it in some of them arises from sentiments Book iv 

 of benevolence ; in some from fallacious reasoning ; 

 and in some from personal envy ; but in none has it 

 been accompanied by those particular faculties on 

 which the actual production of wealth in large quan- 

 tities depends. Socialism, therefore, so far as it is who demands 



i 11 -i the re-distribu- 



a serious theory, is essentially an attempt on the t ion of wealth 

 part of men who are themselves economically im- jJjKjJjJ^ 

 potent to prove that they, and others like them, have ^ ss to P roduce 

 some reasonable right to possess and divide amongst 

 themselves what they are constitutionally powerless 

 to make for themselves. The result has been the 

 elaboration of a theory of production which some- 

 times .declares that wealth is produced by " aggre- 

 gates of conditions," or "social inheritances," or 

 "environments," as Mr. Spencer, Mr. Bellamy, and 

 Mr. Sidney Webb tell us ; and sometimes that it and who con- 

 is produced by "average labour measured by time," fn vents 1 false 

 as Karl Marx tells us, the one doctrine being that f t h s ~^ducS 

 wealth is produced by nobody, and that one man which do no- 



J J thing but de- 



haS thus as good a right to it as another ; the moralise those 



i , . , . . i . , ... who are duped 



other being that it is produced in equal quantities by by them. 

 everybody, and that everybody on that ground has 

 a right to an equal quantity of it. Both doctrines 

 agree in this, that they altogether miss and divert 

 the attention of the mind from the forces and condi- 

 tions on which wealth-production depends in reality. 

 Now if the elaboration of these fallacies had been 

 confined to men who were capable of presenting 

 them in a really arguable form, and if they had been (though even 



' these theories 



promulgated only amongst classes who were capable can be dis- 



