Still another institution of modern industrialism which has come or is coming under the reprobation of the present-day conscience of a rapidly growing number is private capitalism, that is, private ownership of the instruments of production, together with competition and the wage system, the necessary concomitants of this capitalistic régime. These new ethical feelings and convictions form the real motive force in the propaganda of modern socialism. The presupposition of socialism is that not merely ground rents but all returns (interest, dividends, profits) on every form of private capital embody an unearned increment, and that this element should determine the ownership and control of capital. Hence socialists demand that all the material instruments of production now owned by individuals or by a class shall be held in common; that there shall be common, democratic management of production; that competition, as inherently unethical,[732] shall be replaced by coöperation; and that the wage system shall be replaced by a system of distribution by public authority which shall give the manual workers of the world a more equitable share of the products of industry. Socialism embodies one of the largest funds of ethical feeling that have become active in Western civilization since the incoming of Christianity. In truth, in its real essence and purified form it is the spirit of primitive Christianity at work in the industrial domain. It is a recognition of human fraternity. It is an effort to unite economics and ethics, to make business life a realization of the moral ideal. The aim of true socialists is to make the benefits of science, invention, and civilization a common heritage. They recognize that society can continuously progress only as these benefits become the possession not merely of a few but of all. In the disregard of this immutable law of human progress they discern the main cause of the retrogression, decay, and failure of every great civilization of the past; in its solicitous fulfillment they find the only ground of hope for the constant improvement of human society as a whole and the uninterrupted moral progress of the world. _3. The Ethics of Modern Science_ [Sidenote: Science and the virtue of intellectual sincerity] We have already referred to the influence of modern science upon morals. This influence has been felt in the fostering of specific virtues and in the creation of a certain attitude of mind toward life and its ethical problems.