CHAPTER IX.
THE ULTIMATE DIFFICULTY, CONTINUED.
ABILITY AND INDIVIDUAL MOTIVE The fact that the speculative arguments which we have just now been discussing are not only irrelevant to the problem of the able man and his motives, but are tacitly abandoned as being so by the very men who have urged them, when they come to deal specifically with that problem themselves, may suggest to some readers that so long a discussion of them was superfluous.

But though the socialists abandon them at the very moment when, if ever, they ought to be susceptible of some definite application, they abandon them quite unconsciously, and still continue to attach to them some solemn importance.

Such being the case, then, the more futile these arguments are the stronger is the light thrown by them on the peculiar intellectual weakness which distinguishes even the most capable of those who think it worth their while to employ them.

For this reason, therefore, if for no other, our examination of them will have proved useful, for it will have prepared us to encounter a weakness of precisely the same kind in the reasonings of the socialists when they deal with motive directly.
Let us once more state this direct problem of motive, as with perfect accuracy, stated by the socialists themselves.

Under existing conditions the monopolists of business ability are mainly induced to add to the national store of wealth by the prospect, whose fulfilment existing conditions make possible, of retaining shares of it as their own which are proportionate to the amounts produced by them.