_No Socialist can see any reason for continuing a single day the process of fastening the burdens of the future society beforehand on the children of the present generation of wage earners_, children as yet of entirely unknown and undeveloped powers and not yet irremediably shaped to serve in the subordinate roles filled by their parents.
But the reformers other than the Socialists are not even working in this direction, and their claims that they are, can easily be disproved.

Mr.
John A.Hobson, for example, believes that the present British government is seeking to realize "equality of opportunity," which he defines as the effort "to give equal opportunities to all parts of the country and all classes of the people, and so to develop in the fullest and the farthest-sighted way the national resources."[85] But even the more or less democratic collectivism Mr.Hobson and other British Radicals advocate, if it stops short of a certain point, and its benefits go chiefly to the middle classes, may merely increase middle-class competition for better-paid positions, and so obviously _decrease_ the _relative_ opportunities of the masses, and make them _less equal_ than they are to-day.
Edward Bernstein, the Socialist, says: "The number of the possessing classes is to-day not smaller, but larger.

The enormous increase of social wealth is not accompanied by a decreasing number of large capitalists, but by an increasing number of capitalists of all degrees." Whether this is true or not, whether the well-to-do middle classes are gradually increasing in each generation, say, to 5, 10, or 15 per cent of the population, cannot be a matter of more than secondary importance to the overwhelming majority, the "non-possessing classes," that remain outside.

Nobody denies that social evolution is going on even to-day.
But the masses will probably not be willing to wait the necessary generations and centuries before present tendencies, should they chance to continue long enough (which is doubtful in view of the rapid formation of social castes), would bring the masses any considerable share of existing prosperity.
To secure anything approaching equality of opportunity, the first and most necessary measure is to give equal educational facilities to all classes of the population.

Yet the most radical of the non-Socialist educational reformers do not dare to hope at present even for a step in this direction.