It has been defined with accuracy; and by studying its effects in isolation we reach many true conclusions.
But the other motives, with which socialists declare that we must supplement this, are treated by them in a manner so crude, so childish, so incomplete, so deficient in the mere rudiments of scientific analysis, that they do not correspond to anything.

Instead of forming any true addition to the data of economic science, they are like images belonging to the dream of a maudlin school-girl.

They have only the effect of obscuring, not completing, the facts to which the orthodox economists too closely confined themselves, but which, though incomplete, are so far as they go actual.
Now, however, without getting out of touch with the socialists, let us return to firmer ground, and having seen the futility of their attempts to indicate any motive calculated to operate on the monopolists of business ability, other than that supplied under the existing system by the prospect of possessing wealth proportionate to the amount produced by them, let us consider this motive in itself, as history and observation reveal it to us.
And here in the presence of facts which no one seeks to deny, we shall find that the socialists themselves are among our most interesting witnesses, affording in what they assert a solitary and signal exception to that looseness of thought and observation which is otherwise their distinguishing characteristic.

The motive here in question as ascribed to the exceptional wealth-producer, the director, the man of business ability--the motive which in his case the socialists propose to supersede, but which is at present in possession of the field--commonly receives from them the vituperative name of "greed." What they mean by greed is simply the desire of the great wealth-producer to retain for himself a share of wealth, not necessarily equal, but proportionate, to the amount produced by him.

And what have the socialists got to tell us about greed, when they turn from their plans for superseding it in the socialistic future to consider its operations in the actual past and present?
They tell us a great deal.