The desire for wealth, as something distinct from competence, is a desire which normally affects men only in proportion as they believe themselves to be possessed of power by which they may individually earn it; and so long as men recognise the truth that, apart from rare chances, the powers that earn wealth are the exceptional powers that create it, the craving for wealth which makes the non-possession of it a pain is confined to a minority composed of exceptionally constituted individuals. The absence of wealth amongst the majority causes unhappiness only when false theories with regard to its attainability and men’s natural rights to it have produced in the average man an artificial and diseased sensitiveness. There is no surer means of exaggerating inequalities in happiness than the false and pestilent teachings which encourage equality of expectations. And not only do these teachings, so far as they have any effect at all, create private unhappiness and multiply private disappointments, but they give rise amongst masses of men to an impracticable temper, which is the source of many of the difficulties confronting us in the domain of politics, and most of those confronting us in the domain of industry. {369} The crude and childish philosophy which socialists and so-called labour-leaders endeavour to diffuse amongst the great masses of the population rests, so far as the masses of the population understand it, on the theory that society is composed of “approximately equal units,” and that whatever is produced within a community is produced by that community as a whole. Hence the members argue, and the socialists distinctly tell them, that property and capital are merely accidental possessions, which give to those who possess them a purely adventitious power. These teachers add that such possessions, in abstract justice, should be taken from their present possessors and divided amongst the community at large; and from this it follows that all claims to the profits of capital, as put forward by its present possessors, are, in an abstract sense, unjust. The consequence is that the employed, when stimulated into conflict with the employers, enter on the conflict in a temper which forbids them to be satisfied with any immediate result of it, however favourable to themselves. Whatever advance in wages, or reduction in hours, the employers may have conceded, the employed—so far as they are influenced by the socialistic fallacies of the day—consider themselves still wronged almost as much as ever, so long as the employers continue to exist at all; and thus any cordial understanding between the two classes is made impossible. When the employed strike or agitate for higher wages, they may be compared to a man who maintains that his tailor’s bill is {370} exorbitant, and desires to have a certain portion of the total deducted. Now if the tailor is reasonable and agrees to take off something, the matter