en class incomes. Already there is economic equality
between captains, and economic equality between cabin boys. What is at
issue still is whether there shall be economic equality between captains
and cabin boys. What would Jesus have said? Presumably he would have
said that if your only object is to produce a captain and a cabin boy
for the purpose of transferring you from Liverpool to New York, or to
manoeuvre a fleet and carry powder from the magazine to the gun, then
you need give no more than a shilling to the cabin boy for every pound
you give to the more expensively trained captain. But if in addition to
this you desire to allow the two human souls which are inseparable from
the captain and the cabin boy, and which alone differentiate them from
the donkey-engine, to develop all their possibilities, then you may find
the cabin boy costing rather more than the captain, because cabin boy's
work does not do so much for the soul as captain's work. Consequently
you will have to give him at least as much as the captain unless you
definitely wish him to be a lower creature, in which case the sooner
you are hanged as an abortionist the better. That is the fundamental
argument.

THE POLITICAL AND BIOLOGICAL OBJECTIONS TO INEQUALITY.

But there are other reasons for objecting to class stratification of
income which have heaped themselves up since the time of Jesus.
In politics it defeats every form of government except that of a
necessarily corrupt oligarchy. Democracy in the most democratic modern
republics: Prance and the United States for example, is an imposture and
a delusion. It reduces justice and law to a farce: law becomes merely an
instrument for keeping the poor in subjection; and accused workmen
are tried, not by a jury of their peers, but by conspiracies of their
exploiters. The press is the press of the rich and the curse of the
poor: it becomes dangerous to teach men to read. The priest becomes
the mere complement of the policeman in the machinery by which the
countryhouse oppresses the village. Worst of all, marriage becomes a
class affair: the infinite variety of choice which nature offers to the
young in search of a mate is narrowed to a handful of persons of similar
income; and beauty and health become the dreams of artists and the
advertisements of quacks instead of the normal conditions of life.
Society is not only divided but actually destroyed in all directions by
inequality of income between c