But the commonest examples of talent that is wholly mischievous are afforded by certain classes of politicians and social agitators. There is a large number of men whose potential activity is considerable, and whose intellect has a natural nimbleness which will enable them, when stimulated by education, to seize on plausible fallacies and impose them both on themselves and others. Politicians of this class are familiar figures enough. The social agitator, whose mental equipment is similar, is more familiar still. Many attempts have been made to give a scientific explanation of those constant attacks on the existing organisation of society which are common to all civilised countries, and go by the name of socialism. Socialism is said by some to be the protest of increasing poverty against increasing wealth; by some to be the natural voice of highly organised labour, which has come at last to be capable of self-government; and by some to be an embodiment of the esoteric philosophy of Hegel. In reality it is the embodiment of the results of indiscriminate education on talents which are exceptional, but at the same time inefficient. The avowed object of socialism is a redistribution of wealth; but the most striking characteristic of all the socialistic leaders has been an incapacity to produce the thing which they are so anxious to distribute. The wish to {343} redistribute it in some of them arises from sentiments of benevolence; in some from fallacious reasoning; and in some from personal envy; but in none has it been accompanied by those particular faculties on which the actual production of wealth in large quantities depends. Socialism, therefore, so far as it is a serious theory, is essentially an attempt on the part of men who are themselves economically impotent to prove that they, and others like them, have some reasonable right to possess and divide amongst themselves what they are constitutionally powerless to make for themselves. The result has been the elaboration of a theory of production which sometimes declares that wealth is produced by “aggregates of conditions,” or “social inheritances,” or “environments,” as Mr. Spencer, Mr. Bellamy, and Mr. Sidney Webb tell us; and sometimes that it is produced by “average labour measured by time,” as Karl Marx tells us,—the one doctrine being that wealth is produced by nobody, and that one man has thus as good a right to it as another; the other being that it is produced in equal quantities by everybody, and that everybody on that ground has a right to an equal quantity of it. Both doctrines agree in this, that they altogether miss and divert the attention of the mind from the forces and conditions on which wealth-production depends in reality.