For what is, and always has been, their stock moral indictment against the typical men of ability, the pioneers of commerce, the capitalistic directors of labour, the introducers of new inventions, the amplifiers of the world's wealth?
Their chief indictment against such men has been this--that their exceptional ability, instead of being roused into action solely by the pleasure of benefiting their fellow-men, has been utterly dead and irresponsive to every stimulus but one; and that this has been personal greed, and personal greed alone.
Its influence, they say, is as old as civilisation itself, and was as operative in the days when the prows of the Tyrian traders first ploughed their way beyond the pillars of Hercules, as it is to-day under the smoke-clouds of Manchester, of Pittsburg, and Chicago.

Karl Marx for example, in a very interesting passage written in England about the time of the abolition of the Corn-laws, declared that the radical manufacturers, who professed to support that measure on the ground that it would secure cheap food for the people, were not moved in reality, and were not capable of being moved, by any desire but that of lowering the rate of wages, and thus increasing the surplus which they raked into their own pockets.

In other words, the psychologists of socialism declare that, so far as the facts of human nature in the present and the past can teach us anything, the desire of exceptional wealth is just as inseparable from the temperament which, by some physiological law, accompanies the power of producing it, as "the joy in creation" is from the temperament of the great painter, or the love of a woman is from the lover's efforts to win her.
We thus see that those thinkers who, when they are dealing with an imaginary future, base all their hopes on the possibility of a complete elimination of a certain motive from a certain special class of persons, are the very men who are most vehement in declaring that in this special class of persons the motive in question is something so ingrained and inveterate that in no age or country has it ever been so much as modified.
Nor does the matter end here; for the amusing contradiction in which socialistic thought thus lauds itself, is emphasised by the fact that the socialists, when they turn from the few to the many, assume in the many, as an instinct of eternal justice, that precise desire for gain which, in the case of the few, they first denounce as a hideous and incurable disease, and then propose to cure as though it were the passing cough of a baby.

For what is the bait with which, from its first beginnings till to-day, socialism has sought to secure the support of the general multitude?
It is mainly, if not solely, the promise of increased personal gain, without any increased effort on the part of the happy recipients.

With Marx and the earlier socialists, this promise took the form of declaring that every man has a sacred right to whatever he has himself produced, and that, all the wealth of the world being produced by manual labour, the labourers must never be satisfied until they have secured all of it.