kinds:  firstly, educational opportunity; secondly, the opportunity of performing and receiving the full equivalent of an ordinary task or service, such as that of a postman, the value of which depends on its conformity to a prescribed pattern or schedule; and thirdly, opportunity of directing the work of others, thereby initiating new enterprises or realising new inventions—­a kind of opportunity requiring the control of capital, which capital, whether provided by the state or otherwise, would be lost to the community unless it were used efficiently.

With regard to educational opportunity—­it has been seen that it is possible to equalise this, approximately if not entirely, at a given time in the early lives of all, but that it would be possible to maintain the equality for a short time only.

With regard to opportunities of earning a livelihood subsequently by performing one or other of those ordinary and innumerable tasks which must always fall to the lot of four men out of every five, we may say that an equalisation of opportunities of this kind is the admitted object of every reformer and statesman who believes that the prosperity of a country is synonymous with the welfare of its inhabitants.  In achieving this object there are, however, two difficulties—­one being the difficulty, occasional and often frequent in any complex society, of devising work which has any practical value, and replaces its own cost, for all those who are able and willing to perform it; the other being the difficulty which arises from the existence of persons who are incapacitated, by some species of vice, from performing, or from performing adequately, any useful work whatever.  We must here content ourselves with observing that the official directors of industry, who would constitute the state under socialism, would be no more competent to solve the first than are the private employers of to-day, while there is nothing in the scheme of society put forward by socialists, which even purports to supply any solution of the second, other than a more drastic application of the methods applied to-day.

Thirdly, with regard to equality of opportunity for those whose main ambition is not to be provided with some task-work performable by their own hand, but to achieve some position which will enable them to prescribe tasks to others, and thus do justice to their real or supposed talents by the construction of great machines, or the organisation of great enterprises—­in other words, with regard to those persons whose ambition is to obtain what are called the prizes of life, and who think themselves treated unjustly if they find themselves unable to gain them—­we have seen that to provide equal opportunities for all or even for most of these, is in the very nature of things impossible.  The fundamental reason of this, let me say once more, is the fact that the number of men possessing sufficient talent to conceive ambitious schemes of one kind or another far exceeds the number of those whose talents are capable of producing any useful results; and to give to this majority opportunities of testing their projects by experiment would be merely to deplete the resources of the entire nation for the sake of demonstrating to one particular class that abortive talents are worse than no talents at all.