ive
must either be equal or not equal. That at least is plain logic. Either
everybody gets exactly the same wages irrespective of capability and
diligence, or else the wages or salaries or whatever one calls them, are
graded, so that one receives much and the other little.

Now either of these alternatives spells disaster. If the wages are
graded according to capacity, then the grading is done by the
everlasting elective officials. They can, and they will, vote themselves
and their friends or adherents into the good jobs and the high places.
The advancement of a bright and capable young man will depend, not upon
what he does, but upon what the elected bosses are pleased to do with
him; not upon the strength of his own hands, but upon the strength of
the "pull" that he has with the bosses who run the part of the industry
that he is in. Unequal wages under socialism would mean a fierce and
corrupt scramble for power, office and emolument, beside which the
utmost aberrations of Tammany Hall would seem as innocuous as a Sunday
School picnic.

"But," objects Mr. Bellamy or any other socialist, "you forget. Please
remember that under socialism the scramble for wealth is limited; no man
can own capital, but only consumption goods. The most that any man may
acquire is merely the articles that he wants to consume, not the engines
and machinery of production itself. Hence even avarice dwindles and
dies, when its wonted food of 'capitalism' is withdrawn."

But surely this point of view is the very converse of the teachings of
common sense. "Consumption goods" are the very things that we _do_ want.
All else is but a means to them. One admits, as per exception, the queer
acquisitiveness of the miser-millionaire, playing the game for his own
sake. Undoubtedly he exists. Undoubtedly his existence is a product of
the system, a pathological product, a kind of elephantiasis of
individualism. But speaking broadly, consumption goods, present or
future, are the end in sight of the industrial struggle. Give me the
houses and the gardens, the yachts, the motor cars and the champagne and
I do not care who owns the gravel crusher and the steam plow. And if
under a socialist commonwealth a man can vote to himself or gain by the
votes of his adherents, a vast income of consumption goods and leave to
his unhappy fellow a narrow minimum of subsistence, then the resulting
evil of inequality is worse, far worse than it could even be to-day.

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