with
them, and will consequently be unable to impose on him any definite
task. A pressgang could have forced Columbus to labour as a common
seaman; but not all the population of Europe could have forced him to
discover a world beyond the Atlantic; for the mass of his
contemporaries, until his enterprise proved successful, obstinately
refused to believe that there was such a world to discover.

The men, therefore, on the exercise of whose directive ability the
productive efficiency of a modern nation depends, would occupy, with
regard to any nation organised on socialistic principles, a position
fundamentally different from that of the ordinary labourer. The exercise
of their distinctive powers, unlike those of the labourer, could never
be secured by coercion; because neither the nation at large, nor any
body of representatives, could possibly know that these powers existed
until the possessors of them chose to reveal the secret. They could not
be made to reveal it. They could only be induced to do so; and they
could only be induced to do so by a society which was so constituted as
to offer for an exceptional performance some exceptional reward, just as
a reward is offered for evidence against an unknown murderer. The reward
at present offered them is the possession of some exceptional share of
the wealth to the production of which their efforts have exceptionally
contributed; and, hence, since it is the object of all socialistic
schemes to render the achievement of such a reward impossible, we shall
find that the ultimate problem for socialists of the modern school is
how to discover another which in practice will be equally efficacious.

But though this is the ultimate problem, it is very far from being the
only one which the theory of socialism in its modern form raises.
Directive ability, which is a compound of many faculties, varies greatly
in degree and kind. Its value, if tested by the results of its actual
application to labour, would in some cases be immense, in other cases
very small, and in others it would be a minus quantity. Thus, even if we
suppose that the exercise of it is so far its own reward that all who
believe themselves to possess it--and these are a very large
number--will, for the mere pleasure of exercising it, be eager to gain
the positions which will make its exercise possible, the problem would
remain of how to discriminate those who would, as industrial directors,
achieve the greatest succe