The _Independent_ recently published an article entitled “Poverty: Its Cause and Cure,” by Mr. James Mackaye, a Harvard graduate and technological chemist; in the course of its editorial comment the paper hailed his plan for the abolition of poverty as “nothing less than a very great invention.” “It adds something that was lacking in the older schemes of Socialism,” the _Independent_ continued, “but absolutely necessary to any Socialism that would be practically workable.” This “something” is a device to increase the salaries of managers of the various industrial departments in proportion as they reduced the “producing time” of the commodity for which they were responsible. Mr. Mackaye is another student who, like Professor Reeve and Professor Veblen, have come into Socialism by their own routes. In his elaborate book, “The Economy of Happiness,” he shows so thorough a grasp of the whole subject that I cannot suppose him to share in the ignorance of the literature of modern proletarian Socialism, which leads the _Independent_ to hail his plan as a “great invention.” As a matter of fact, I could name a score of Socialist books and pamphlets in which such plans are suggested and discussed. I personally have always rejected them as unsound in theory and unnecessary in practice. I have already suggested the likelihood of a continuance of present official salaries after the revolution; but there will be a strong tendency to reduce these, and I can see no ultimate result except equality of compensation by the State. I can see no theoretical basis for the State’s paying to any employee more than it pays to another in the same industry—hand labour being equally as necessary to the production of wealth as is superintendence. To my mind, the only necessary stimulus to efficiency is the community of interest of all the workers. The incentive to the manager is emulation, and the higher range of activity which goes with a position of command; and I should be very jealous of the introduction of any pecuniary motive into the struggle for promotion—as likely to continue the old evils of graft and favouritism to which we are now subject. I do not think that, when you have so organised industry that every man is working for himself, you will find it necessary to employ any outside force to impel him to work; and in fact I should consider it a violation of the rights of the worker to attempt anything of the sort. Of course if the workers themselves chose to offer a bonus to a manager to invent new methods, that would be another matter; but that would come under the head of intellectual production, which I shall consider later on.