similar process would be repeated in after-life. This policy, as has been pointed out already, is, even if wasteful, not ruinous in the sphere of ordinary labour--a fact which shows how wide the difference is between the ordinary faculties, as applied to industry, and the exceptional; but no one in his senses, not even the most ardent apostle of equality, would dream of recommending its application to efforts of a higher kind, and demand that the clever boys should periodically be made to wait for the stupid, or that the best doctor in the presence of a great pestilence should not be allowed to cure more patients than the worst one. If, then, it is, as it must be, the ideal aim of social arrangements generally to enable each to raise his capacities to their practical maximum, and adjust his desires and his expectations to the practical possibilities of attainment, "relative equality of opportunity," firstly in education and secondly in practical life, is a formula which accurately expresses the means by which this end is to be secured; but the absolute equality which is contemplated by socialists and others is an ideal which, the moment we attempted to translate it into terms of the actual, would begin to fall to pieces, defeating its own purpose; and there is nothing in socialism, were socialism otherwise practicable, any more than there is the existing system, which would obviate this result. Indeed, it may be observed further that, though the idea of equality of opportunity in general is not inconsistent with a socialistic scheme of society, as socialists of the more thoughtful kind have now come to conceive of it, it belongs distinctively to the domain of the fiercest individual competition. For in so far as socialism differs from ordinary individualism, it differs from it in this--that, instead of encouraging each man to do his utmost because what he gets will be proportionate to what he does, it aims at establishing a greater equality in what men get by making this independent of whether they do much or little; in which case the main concern of the individual would be the certainty of getting what he wanted, not the opportunity of producing it.