Between persons of equal income there is no social distinction except the distinction of merit. Money is nothing: character, conduct, and capacity are everything. Instead of all the workers being levelled down to low wage standards and all the rich levelled up to fashionable income standards, everybody under a system of equal incomes would find her and his own natural level. There would be great people and ordinary people and little people; but the great would always be those who had done great things, and never the idiots whose mothers had spoiled them and whose fathers had left them a hundred thousand a year; and the little would be persons of small minds and mean characters, and not poor persons who had never had a chance. That is why idiots are always in favor of inequality of income (their only chance of eminence), and the really great in favour of equality. 23 INCENTIVE When we come to the objections to equal division of income we find that most of them come to no more than this: that we are not accustomed to it, and have taken unequal division between classes so much for granted that we have never thought any other state of things possible, not to mention that the teachers and preachers appointed for us by the rich governing class have carefully hammered into us from our childhood that it is wicked and foolish to question the right of some people to be much better off than others. Still, there are other objections. So many of them have been already disposed of in our examination of the schemes for unequal distribution that we need deal now with two only. The first is that unless a woman were allowed to get more money than another she would have no incentive to work harder. One answer to this is that nobody wants her to work harder than another at the national task. On the contrary, it is desirable that the burden of work, without which there could be no income to divide, should be shared equally by the workers. If those who are never happy unless they are working insist on putting in extra work to please themselves, they must not pretend that this is a painful sacrifice for which they should be paid; and, anyhow, they can always work off their superfluous energy on their hobbies. On the other hand, there are people who grudge every moment they have to spend in working. That is no excuse for letting them off their share. Anyone who does less than her share of work, and yet takes her full share of the wealth produced by work, is a thief, and should be dealt with as any other sort of thief is dealt with.