a narrow, limited,
specialized intelligence, Rockefellers, Morgans and the like, people
neither great nor beautiful, mere financial monomaniacs, who can keep
themselves devoted to and concentrated upon gain. To the majority of
capable good human stuff, buying and selling, saving and investing,
insuring oneself and managing property, is a mass of uncongenial,
irrational and tiresome procedure, conflicting with the general trend
of instinct and the finer interests of life. The great mass of men and
women, indeed, find the whole process so against nature, that in spite
of all the miseries of poverty, all the slavery of the economic
disadvantage, they cannot urge themselves to this irksome cunning game
of besting the world, they remain poor. Most, in a sort of despair,
make no effort; many resort to that floundering endeavour to get by
accident, gambling; many achieve a precarious and unsatisfactory
gathering of possessions, a few houses, a claim on a field, a few
hundred pounds in some investment as incalculable as a kite in a gale;
just a small minority have and get--for the most part either
inheritors of riches or energetic people who, through a real dulness
toward the better and nobler aspects of life, can give themselves
almost entirely to grabbing and accumulation. To such as these, all
common men who are not Socialists do in effect conspire to give the
world.

The Anti-Socialist argues that out of this evil of encouraged and
stimulated avarice comes good, and that this peculiar meanly greedy
type that predominates in the individualist world to-day, the
Rockefeller-Harriman type, "creates" great businesses, exploits the
possibilities of nature, gives mankind railways, power, commodities.
As a matter of fact, a modern intelligent community is quite capable
of doing all these things infinitely better for itself, and the
beneficent influence of commerce may easily become, and does easily
become, the basis of a cant. Exploitation by private persons is no
doubt a necessary condition to economic development in an illiterate
community of low intelligence, just as flint implements marked a
necessary phase in the social development of mankind; but to-day the
avaricious getter, like some obsolescent organ in the body, consumes
strength and threatens health. And to-day he is far more mischievous
than ever he was before, because of the weakened hold of the old
religious organization upon his imagination. For the most part the