“That is correct,” he replied, “until work becomes an instinct it is necessary to stimulate exertion by the better rewards that extra industry can procure. The socialists in your day proposed no plan that calculated sufficiently upon the selfishness of the individual. They expected that everybody would accept the position assigned to him and work faithfully for the good of all. But it was too soon to expect this. Your race is very young. It is not so long since your ancestors ceased to depend on the spontaneous productions of the earth for their sustenance, and began to supplement them by their own exertions. With some of your races work is beginning to be instinctive, but there are yet enough in every nation, who, by their hereditary aversion to exertion are ready to shirk out of labor and make the burden of the instinctively industrious intolerable. Your race is too young yet, here at the close of the twentieth century, to take on the purely instinctive socialistic conditions as we Lunarians have them.” “You think then that socialism to be successful must be instinctive as it is with the bees?” “To be permanently successful it must be founded upon such an instinct for industry, that makes it more agreeable for a person to work, than to be idle, or to be merely amused. That is, the individual must love work for the sake of the work rather than for the reward that is to come after it. It is indeed true that only the stimulation of the reward at the end could ever have created or kept up the habit of work until it became instinctive, and it is true that if this reward at the end should habitually cease to be realized to at least some degree, the instinct for the work would in course of time become undone—unwound as we might say. The expectation of the reward if it is as constant as the work, would naturally become a part of the instinct. But there are often disappointments as to the reward, while the work itself remains constant, so that this part of the instinct learns to be satisfied with smaller and smaller results until finally the necessaries of painless existence in which the working apparatus is kept in proper operating order are all the reward that the instinct requires.” “Then,” said I, “in this supreme ideal of socialistic instinct, I understand you, that the individual lays aside all expectation of personal enjoyment, or the possession of anything in the way of luxuries or superfluities. It seems to me such an existence must be a very narrow one.”