Though most of them now recognise, like the author of "The Gospel for To-day," that the economic efficiencies of men are in the highest degree unequal, they propose out of an inequality of functions to produce an equality of conditions.

The details of the changes by which they propose to effect this result, or the grounds on which they seek to represent this result as possible, vary like the details of the systems of ingenious gamblers.
But whatever these details may be, whether they are details of scheme or argument, the essential element of each is the omission of some fundamental fact--or, rather, of one protean fact--by which socialistic thinkers are often honestly confused, because it assumes, as they shift their positions, any number of different aspects.

This is the fact that out of unequal men it is absolutely impossible to construct a society of equals.
Two illustrations, taken from the history of socialistic thought, will show how socialists hide this fact from themselves, first by a fallacy of one kind, then by a fallacy of another kind; and how, wherever it is located, it is the essential factor in their argument.
In their endeavour to prove the possibility of an equalisation, absolute or approximate, of economic conditions, Karl Marx and the earlier socialists started with two main doctrines.

The one was a moral doctrine; the other was an economic.

The moral doctrine was that, as a matter of eternal justice, every man has a right to the whole of what is produced by him.