diagnosis, no matter how grotesque, which a patient makes of his or of her own sufferings, and even the remedies which his or her fancy suggests, often assist doctors to discover what the ailment really is, so does socialism, alike in its diagnosis and its proposed cure, call attention to the existence of ailments in the body politic, and may even afford some clue to the treatment which the case requires, though this will be widely different from what the sufferer fancies.

Such being the case, then, in order that a true treatment may be adopted, the first thing to be done is to show the corporate patient precisely how and why the socialistic diagnosis is erroneous, and the proposed socialistic remedies incomparably worse than the disease.  To this preparatory work the present volume has been devoted.  Let us reconsider the outline of its general argument.  As thoughtful socialists to-day are themselves coming to admit, the augmented wealth distinctive of the modern world is produced and sustained by the ability of the few, not by the labour of the many.  The ability of the few is thus productive in the modern world in a manner in which it never was productive in any previous period, because, whereas in earlier ages the strongest wills and the keenest practical intellects were devoted to military conquest and the necessities of military defence, they have, in the modern world, to a constantly increasing degree, been deflected from the pursuits of war and concentrated on those of industry.  But the old principle remains in operation still, of which military leadership was only one special exemplification.  Nations now grow rich through industry as they once grew rich through conquest, because new commanders, with a precision unknown on battle-fields, direct the minutest operations of armies of a new kind; and the only terms on which any modern nation can maintain its present productivity, or hope to increase it in the future, consist in the technical submission of the majority of men to the guidance of an exceptional minority.  As for the majority—­the mass of average workers—­they produce to-day just as much as, and no more than, they would produce if the angel of some industrial Passover were henceforward to kill, each year on a particular day, every human being who had risen above the level of his fellows, and, in virtue of his knowledge, ingenuity, genius, energy, and initiative, was capable of directing his fellows better than they could direct themselves.  If such an annual decimation were inaugurated to-morrow in civilised countries such as Great Britain and America, the mass of the population would soon sink into a poverty deeper and more helpless than that which was their lot before the ability of the few, operating through modern capital, began to lend to the many an efficiency not their own.  In other words, the entire “surplus values”—­to adopt the phrase of Marx—­which have been produced during the last hundred and fifty years, have been