The absurdity of Mr. Webb’s position will be seen yet more clearly when we see how it looks {76} when stated in the language of Mr. Bellamy. “_Nine hundred and ninety-nine parts out of the thousand of every man’s produce are the result of his inheritance and his environment._” Now if this proposition has any practical application, it must mean that the whole living population—great men and ordinary men, labourers and directors of labour—who are commonly held to be the producers of the income of Great Britain to-day, really produce of it only one farthing in the pound; and hence, if we still persist in considering the proposition a practical one, we shall be forced to conclude that the whole of the living population might at any given moment stop work altogether, or fall into a trance like the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, and the production would continue with hardly an appreciable diminution. Again, if the proposition has any practical bearing on economics, it must necessarily have a bearing precisely similar on morals. If a man of to-day produces only a thousandth part of what he seems to produce, it is equally evident that he does only a thousandth part of what he seems to do. Let us see, if we accept this theory, to what sort of conclusions it will lead us. One conclusion to which it will lead us at once is the following—that each of us is responsible only for a thousandth part of his actions; and from this will follow others more remarkable still. Since the holiest man has elements of evil in him, and the worst man elements of good, the good deeds for which we honour the saint may {77} really be the result of his antecedents, and his few faulty deeds may be all that we are to attribute to himself; whilst, conversely, the criminal’s antecedents may have been the cause of all his crimes and vices, and he may himself have done nothing but some acts of unnoticed kindness. It will be thus impossible to form any true judgment of anybody; for the real St. Peter may have been merely a false and truculent ruffian, and the real Judas Iscariot may have been fit for Abraham’s bosom. And yet even these conclusions deducible from the premises of Mr. Bellamy are sane when compared with those deducible from the premises of Mr. Sidney Webb; for Mr. Bellamy would allow a man to be responsible for a thousandth part of his actions at all events, whilst Mr. Sidney Webb would not allow that anybody either did or was responsible for anything.