Mr. Bellamy and his friends, when considering matters in this light, are not too extreme in their conclusions.  On the contrary, they are too modest.  For men, if they were really isolated from their social inheritance and environment, could not only do but little; they could do absolutely nothing.  The admission, therefore, that for practical purposes they must be held to do something at all events, is an admission wrung from our philosophers by the exigencies of common-sense.  As such, then, let us accept it; and what will our conclusion be?  It will be this:  that whatever it may be which the ordinary man produces, and in whatever sense he produces it, the great man, in the same sense, produces a great deal more.  The difference between them in efficiency will be no more lessened by the fact that both are standing on the pedestal of a common past, than the difference in stature will be lessened between a dwarf and a giant because they are both standing on the top of a New York skyscraper, or because they have both been nourished on the same species of food.

But the practical absurdity of the whole set of arguments urged in a contrary sense by Herbert Spencer, Mr. Kidd, and the speculative sociologists generally, is brought to its climax by those modern exponents of socialism who attempt to invest them with a moral as well as an industrial significance.  Thus Mr. Webb, who himself frankly recognises that the monopolists of business ability are industrially more efficient than the great mass of their fellows, and that man for man they produce incomparably more wealth, endeavours, by means of the arguments which we have been just considering, to show that though they produce it they have no moral right to keep it.  The proposal, he says, that, though men are vastly unequal in productivity, they should all of them be awarded an equal share of the product—­that if one man produces only one shilling, while another man produces ninety-nine, the resulting hundred should be halved and each of the men take fifty—­this proposal “has,” he says, “an abstract justification, as the special energy and ability with which some persons are born is an unearned increment due to the effect of the struggle for existence upon their ancestors, and consequently, having been produced by society, is as much due to society as the unearned increment of rent.”

Now, if this argument has any practical meaning at all, it can only mean that the men who have been born with such special powers will, as soon as they recognise what the origin of these powers is, realise that they have, as individuals, no special claims on the results of them, and will consequently become more willing than they are at the present time to continue to produce the results, though they will not be allowed to keep them.  We will not insist, as we might do, on the curious want of knowledge of human nature which the argument thus put forward by Mr. Webb and other socialists betrays.  It will be enough to point out that,