antly
shine; where health is failing, a talent may console; where the family
life is unhappy, the ambitions for a career may be fulfilled. Much
inequality will thus result, but the chances for a certain evenness of
human joy and sorrow will be the greater the more numerous the sources
from which the joys and griefs of our days are springing. Add the
inequalities of wealth, and you increase the chances that the
emotional values in the lives of all of us will become more equal. The
ugly girl may be rich and the poor one may be beautiful, the genius
may hunger and the stupid man may marry the widow with millions, the
healthy man may have to earn his scanty living and the patient may
enjoy the luxuries of life. Their states of feeling will be more alike
than if a socialistic order had put them all on the same economic
level of philistine comfort. The joys of capital are after all much
less deeply felt than any of those others, and the sufferings from
poverty are much less incisive than those from disappointed ambition,
from jealousy, from illness, or from bereavement. It is well known
that many more people die from overfeeding than from underfeeding. We
may feel disgusted that the luxuries so often fall to the unworthy and
that the finest people have to endure the hardship of narrow means.
But all those other gifts and deprivations, those talents and beauties
and powers and family relations, are no less arbitrarily dealt out. We
all may wish to be geniuses or radiant beauties, great singers or
fathers of a dozen children; we have not chosen our more modest lot.

It might be answered that the poverty of the industrial masses to-day
means not only the absence of the special comforts, but that it means
positive suffering. Men are starving from want and are chained down
like slaves to a torturing task. But let us discriminate. It is true
in states of unemployment and illness the physical man may be crushed
by naked poverty, but that has nothing whatever to do with socialism.
We have emphasized before that it is the solemn duty of society to
find ways and means to protect every one who is willing to work as
long as he is healthy, against starvation in times of old age and
sickness, and if possible in periods of market depression. The
non-socialistic community has the power to take care of that, and it
is entirely an illusory belief that socialism has in that respect any
advantage. All the comparisons of the two economic orders o