So-called steps towards equal opportunities, even if rapid enough to produce a very large surplus of trained applicants for whom capitalism fails to provide and so increase the army of malcontents, may simply delay the day of Socialism.
I have spoken of Socialists whose underlying object is opportunistic--to obtain immediate results in legislation no matter how unrelated they may be to Socialism.

Others are impelled either by an inactive idealism, or by attachment to abstract dogma for its own sake.

Their custom is in the one instance to make the doctrine so rigid that it has no immediate application, and in the other to "elevate the ideal" so high, to remove it so far into the future, that it is scarcely visible for the present-day purposes, and then to declare that present-day activity, even if theoretically subject to an ideal or a doctrine, must be guided also by quite other and "practical" principles, which are never clearly defined and sometimes are scarcely mentioned.

Mr.Edmond Kelly, for instance, puts his "Collectivism Proper," or Socialism, so far into the future that he is forced to confess that it will be attained only "ultimately," or perhaps not at all, while "Partial Collectivism may prove to be the last stage consistent with human imperfection."[100] He acknowledges that this Partial Collectivism ("State Socialism") is not the ideal, and it is evident that his ideal is too far ahead or too rigid or theoretical, to have any connection with the ideals of the Socialist movement, which arise exclusively out of actual life.
This opportunism defends itself by an appeal to the "evolutionary" argument, that progress must necessarily be extremely slow.

Progress in this view, like Darwin's variations, takes place a step at a time, and its steps are infinitesimally small.