, which
automatically increase the powers of the ablest directors of labour, and
concurrently decrease or extinguish those of the less able. Socialism,
with its collective capital, and its able men reduced or elevated to the
rank of state officials, while not obviating, but on the contrary
emphasising the necessity for placing labour under the highest directive
ability, or, in other words, the necessity for competition among able
men, would dislocate the only machinery by which such competition can be
made effective; and, if it did not destroy the efficiency of the highest
ability altogether, would reduce this to a minimum, and confine it
within the narrowest limits.

In this chapter, however, we have been dealing with the machinery only.
We have been assuming the unabated activity of the powers by which the
machinery is to be driven. That is to say, we have been assuming that
every man who possesses, or imagines himself to possess, any exceptional
gift for directing labour--whether as an inventor, a man of science, an
organiser, or in any other capacity--would be no less eager, under the
circumstances with which socialism would surround him, to develop and
exert his faculties than he is at the present day. We will now pass on
to the question of how far this assumption is correct. The question of
machinery is secondary. It is a question of detail only; for if there is
no power in the background by which the machinery may be driven, it will
not make much difference in the result whether the machinery be bad or
good.

And here once more we shall find that the socialists of to-day agree
with us; and in passing on to the question now before us, we shall be
quitting a region of speculations which can be only of a general kind
(for they refer to social arrangements whose details are not definitely
specified), and we shall find ourselves confronted by a variety of ideas
and principles which, however confused they may be in the minds of those
who enunciate them, we shall have no difficulty ourselves in reducing to
logical order.

FOOTNOTES:

[10] That such is the case can be seen easily enough by imagining a
socialistic community consisting of twenty men, who require and consume
only one article, bread. Each man, to keep him alive, requires one loaf
daily; but to eat two would be a comfort to him, and to eat three would
be luxury. The community is divided into two groups of ten men each, one
man in each group directing the