Surely, you will say, if Capitalism leads to this, it leads to an earthly paradise. Leaving out of account the question whether the paradise, if realized, would not be a fool’s paradise (for, I am sorry to say, we have all been brought up to regard such a state of things as the perfection of human society), and admitting that something like it has been half realized in spots in many places from Monte Carlo to Gleneagles, and from Gleneagles to Palm Beach, it is never realized for a whole country. It has often been carried far enough to reduce powerful empires like Rome and Spain to a state of demoralized impotence in which they were broken up and plundered by the foreigners on whom they had allowed themselves to become dependent; but it never has, and never can, build up a stable Parasitic State in which all the workers are happy and contented because they share the riches of the capitalists, and are kept healthy and pleasant and nice because the capitalists are cultivated enough to dislike seeing slums and shabby ugly people and running the risk of catching infectious diseases from them. When capitalists are intelligent enough to care whether the whole community is healthy and pleasant and happy or not, even when the unpleasantnesses do not come under their own noses, they become Socialists, for the excellent reason that there is no fun in being a capitalist if you have to take care of your servants and tradesmen (which means sharing your income with them) as affectionately as if they were your own family. If your taste and conscience were cultivated to that extent you would find such a responsibility unbearable, because you would have to be continually thinking of others, not only to the necessary and possible extent of taking care that your own activities and conveniences did not clash unreasonably and unkindly with theirs, but to the unnecessary and impossible extent of doing all the thinking for them that they ought to do, and in freedom could do, for themselves. It is easy to say that servants should be treated well not only because humanity requires it but because they will otherwise be unpleasant and dishonest and inefficient servants. But if you treat your servants as well as you treat yourself, which really amounts to spending as much money on them as on yourself, what is the use of having servants? They become a positive burden, expecting you to be a sort of Earthly Providence to them, which means that you spend half your time thinking for them and the other half talking about them. Being able to call your servants your own is a very poor compensation for not being able to call your soul your own. That is why, even as it is, you run away from your comfortable house to live in hotels (if you can afford it), because, when you have paid your bill and tipped the waiter and the chambermaid, you are finished with them, and have not to be a sort of matriarch to them as well.