If the socialists, however, confined themselves to maintaining that the desire of such rewards as these constitutes a sufficient motive to exceptional activity of certain kinds, they would not only be asserting what nobody else would deny, but they would be putting forward nothing which, as socialists, it is their interest to assert. The ultimate proposition which, as socialists, they aim at establishing is not that certain kinds of exceptional men do certain kinds of exceptional things, in obedience to the motives in question; but that because some exceptional men, endowed with certain temperaments, are motived by them to activities of certain specific kinds, other exceptional men will be motived by them with equal certainty to other activities of a kind totally different—and more especially to the activities which result in the production of wealth. Here is the fundamental point on which the socialists join issues with their opponents. Their opponents, they say, assume that the sole reward or advantage, the desire of which will stimulate the monopolists of “business ability” to exert that ability in the production and augmentation of wealth, is a share of wealth for themselves proportionate to the amount produced by them—an {286} amount which will separate their lot from that of the majority of their fellows. Now if this should be really the case, as the socialists are coming to perceive, the fact would be fatal to the entire ideal of socialism. They are consequently now directing the best of their ingenuity to showing that the desire of possessing exceptional wealth is altogether superfluous as a motive for producing it, and that the great producers of it, when all chance of possessing it is taken from them, will find in the pleasures of the strain which the productive process necessitates—especially if these are supplemented by the inexpensive thanks of the community—a more powerful inducement to exertion than is the prospect of the largest fortune.