“Can you entertain any doubts?” answered Forest. “Look around! Is the leading principle in creation equality or variety? You find sometimes similitude but never conformity. Botanists have carefully compared thousands of leaves, which looked exactly alike at the first glance, but which after close examination were found to possess striking dissimilarities. Inequality is the law of nature and the attempt to establish equality is therefore unnatural and absurd. Where-ever such experiments have been made, they have ended in unqualified failure. Even some of the first Christians, moved by brotherly love and charity, failed in their efforts to establish communism permanently. And the lamented Procrustes used two bedsteads in which he placed his victims. He could not get along with one size for everybody. We may just as well try to make every man six feet long, forty-two inches around his chest, with a Grecian nose, blue eyes, light hair and a lyric tenor voice, as to attempt to equalize all lives and reduce them to a communistic state.--Now consider, in connection with the difference in the mental and physical powers of men, their different inclinations and tastes, the variety of their occupations, and then say, whether the establishment of society on the basis of communism, of absolute equality, is possible.” “If I have formed a just appreciation of the organization of your society, you have recognized the right of all men to a living by giving everybody an equal share of the products of labor”, I objected; “but at the same time you give everybody the chance to select the profession or trade most to his taste and you have graded the men, belonging to a guild, thus inciting the ambition of the worker, to reach a higher grade, and creating a diversity of positions, adapted to that dissimilarity of men, you were just speaking of”.