HONOUR AS A SUBSTITUTE FOR WEALTH 355 



the present moment. They, as has been said 

 already, though they consider themselves the apostles 

 of equality, recognise that the prosperity, and, 

 above all, the wealth of the community, will depend 

 on their securing the very ablest of their citizens 

 as members of the bureaucracy by whom all 

 labour will be directed ; and they recognise that 

 these able men, like the present race of employers, 

 will not develop their ability without some special 

 inducement. They accordingly propose to reward 

 them, not by allowing them to retain any ex- 

 ceptional portion of the wealth which they are 

 instrumental in producing, but by investing them 

 with exceptional honour ; and the desire for such 

 honour, say the socialists, as a motive to exceptional 

 effort, "will be incalculably more efficacious" than 

 the desire for wealth. Now if those who make this 

 assertion attribute to it any serious meaning, they 

 must mean that men like honour much better than 

 they like wealth that they covet it more keenly, 

 that they will struggle more desperately to win it, 

 and are more exasperated at not possessing it. If, 

 however, great wealth is possible for the few only, 

 and if the majority of mankind are for ever destined 

 to be without it, such, with regard to honour, is the 

 case even more evidently. For honour is more essen- 

 tially confined to the few than wealth is. We can, at 

 all events, conceive a community composed wholly 

 of millionaires, supported in luxury by battalions of 

 labouring automata ; but it is impossible to conceive 

 a community wholly composed of men on whom 



