If we attempted to organise a community in accordance with such a conclusion as this, we should be getting rid of all connection between conduct and the natural results of it, and divorcing action from motive altogether. Such is the conclusion to which Mr. Webb's argument would lead us; and the absurdity of the argument, as applied by him to moral claims and merits, though more self-evident, is not any more complete than the absurdity of similar arguments as applied to the individual generally in respect of his productive powers, and the amount of produce produced by them. The whole conception, in short, of the individual as merged in the aggregate has no relation to practical life whatever. For the practical man the individual is always a unit; and it is only as a unit that it is possible practically to deal with him. We may change him in some respects by changing his general conditions, as we hope to do by legislation which aims at the diminution of drunkenness; but a change in general conditions, if it diminished drunkenness generally, would do so only because it affected at the same time the isolated minds and organisms of a number of individual drunkards. And to do Mr. Webb and his brother socialists justice, they unconsciously admit all this themselves; for, as soon as they set themselves to discuss the motives of the able man in detail, they altogether abandon the irrelevancies of speculative sociology with which they manage at other times to bemuse themselves. That such is the case we shall see in the following chapter. I will, however, anticipate what we shall see there by mentioning that among the motives which are in the socialistic future to replace, among able men, the desire of economic gain, one of the chief is to be the desire of moral approbation. Unless a man's actions, whether industrial or moral, are to be treated as his own, instead of being attributed to his conditions, he would have as little right to the praise which it is proposed to give him as he would have to the dollars which it is proposed to take away. FOOTNOTES: [12] I first made this criticism of Spencer in my work _Aristocracy and Evolution_. On that occasion Mr. Spencer wrote to me, complaining with much vehemence that I had misrepresented him; and he repeated the substance of his letter in a subsequent published essay. My criticism dealt, and could have dealt only, not with what he meant, but what he said; and certainly in his language--and, as I think, in his own mind--there was a constant confusion between the two truths in question. Apart, however, from what he considered to be my own misrepresentation of himself, he declared that he entirely agreed with me; and that "great men" must, for practical purposes, be regarded as the true causes of such changes as they initiate. CHAPTER IX THE ULTIMATE DIFFICULTY, CONTINUED. ABILITY AND INDIVIDUAL MOTIVE