and faculties.
Whoever has worked with a large number of people in one establishment
knows that men who prove themselves unfit and useless in a certain line,
do excellent work in another. There is no normally constructed being who
fails to meet the highest demands in one line or another, the moment he
finds himself in the right place. By what right does any claim
precedence over another? If any one has been treated so step-motherly by
Nature that with the best will he can not do what others can, _Society
has no right to punish him for the shortcomings of Nature_. If, on the
contrary, a person has received from Nature gifts that raise him above
others, _Society is not obliged to reward what is not his personal
desert_. In Socialist society all enjoy equal conditions of life and
opportunities for education; all are furnished the same opportunities to
develop their knowledge and powers according to their respective
capacities and inclinations. In this lies a further guarantee that not
only will the standard of culture and powers be higher in Socialist than
in bourgeois society, but also that both will be more equally
distributed and yet be much more manifold.

When, on a journey up the Rhine, Goethe studied the Cathedral of
Cologne, he discovered in the archives that the old master-builders paid
their workmen equal wages for equal time. They did so because they
wished to get good and conscientious work. This looks like an anomaly to
modern bourgeois society. It introduced the system of piece-work, that
drives the workingmen to out-work one another, and thus aids the
employer in underpaying and in reducing wages.

As with manual, so with mental work. Man is the product of the time and
circumstances that he lives in. A Goethe, born under equally favorable
conditions in the fourth, instead of the eighteenth, century might have
become, instead of a distinguished poet and naturalist, a great Father
of the Church, who might have thrown St. Augustine into the shade. If,
on the other hand, instead of being the son of a rich Frankfort
patrician, Goethe had been born the son of a poor shoemaker of the same
town, he never would have become the Minister of the Grand Duke of
Weimar, but would probably have remained a shoemaker, and died an
honorable member of the craft. Goethe himself recognized the advantage
he had in being born in a materially and socially favorable station in
order to reach his stage of development. It so appears