Equality of opportunity in the human race-course. To multiply competitors is to multiply failures. Educational opportunity. Unequal students soon make opportunities unequal. Opportunity in industrial life. Socialistic promises of equal industrial opportunities for all. Each "to paddle his own canoe." These absurd promises inconsistent with the arguments of socialists themselves. A socialist's attempt to defend these promises by reference to employes of the state post-office. Equality of industrial opportunity for those who believe themselves possessed of exceptional talent and aspire "to rise." Opportunities for such men involve costly experiment, and are necessarily limited. Claimants who would waste them indefinitely more numerous than those who could use them profitably. Such opportunities mean the granting to one man the control of other men by means of wage-capital. Disastrous effects of granting such opportunities to all or even most of those who would believe themselves entitled to them. True remedy for the difficulties besetting the problem of opportunity. Ruskin on human demands. Needs and "romantic wishes." The former not largely alterable. The latter depend mainly on education. The problem practically soluble by a wise moral education only, which will correlate demand and expectation with the personal capacities of the individual. Relative equality of opportunity, not absolute equality, the true formula. Equality of opportunity, though much talked about by socialists, is essentially a formula of competition, and opposed to the principles of socialism. CHAPTER XVI THE SOCIAL POLICY OF THE FUTURE THE MORAL OF THIS BOOK This book, though consisting of negative criticism and analysis of facts, and not trenching on the domain of practical policy and constructive suggestion, aims at facilitating a rational social policy by placing in their true perspective the main statical facts and dynamic forces of the modern economic world, which socialism merely confuses. In pointing out the limitations of labour as a productive agency, and the dependence of the labourers on a class other than their own, it does not seek to represent the aspirations of the former to participate in the benefits of progress as illusory, but rather to place such aspirations on a scientific basis, and so to remove what is at present the principal obstacle that stands in the way of a rational and scientific social policy. A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF SOCIALISM CHAPTER I THE HISTORICAL BEGINNING OF SOCIALISM AS AN OSTENSIBLY SCIENTIFIC THEORY