by them just as freely as the fireman climbs his ladder, or as life-belts are distributed by the boatmen in their work of rescue.  And if human life were nothing but a chronic conflagration or shipwreck, in which all alike were fighting for bare existence, all alike being menaced by some terrible and instant death, this argument of the socialists might doubtless have some truth in it.  The men of exceptional ability, by a variety of ingenious devices, might seek to save others no less assiduously than themselves, without expecting anything like exceptional wealth as a reward; for there would, in a case like this, be no question of wealth for anybody.  But as soon as the stress of such a situation was relaxed, and the abilities of the ablest, liberated from the task of contending with death, were left free to devote themselves to the superfluous decoration of life, the artificial tension of the moral motives would be relaxed.  The swimmer who had plunged into the sea to save a woman from drowning would not take a second plunge to rescue her silk petticoat.  The socialists, in short, when dealing with military and other cognate heroisms, ignore both of the causes which alone make such heroisms possible.  They ignore the fact that the internal motive is essentially isolated and exceptional.  They ignore the further fact that the circumstances which alone give this motive play are essentially exceptional also, and could never be reproduced in social life at large, except at the cost of making all human life intolerable.

I have called special attention to this particular socialistic argument, partly because socialists, and other sentimental thinkers, like Ruskin, attach such extreme importance to it; but mainly because it affords us an exceptionally striking illustration of the manner in which they are accustomed to reason about matters with regard to which they ostentatiously profess themselves to be the pioneers of accurate science.  One of the principal grounds—­to repeat what has been said already—­on which they attack what they call the Economics of Capitalism, is that it deals exclusively with the actions of “the economic man,” or the man whose one motive is the appropriation of wealth.  Such a man, they say, is an abstraction.  He does not exist in reality; and if economics is to have any scientific value it must deal with man as a whole, in all his living complexity.  As applied to the orthodox economists this criticism has an element of truth in it; but when the socialists attempt to act on their own loudly boasted principles, and deal with human nature as a whole instead of only one of its elements, they do nothing but travesty the error which they set out with denouncing.  The one-motived economic man who cares only for personal gain is, no doubt, an abstraction, like the lines and points of Euclid.  Still the motive ascribed to him is one which has a real existence and produces real effects.  It has been defined with accuracy; and by studying its