one form or another, their root-fallacy reappears.  In short, their arguments are illusionary in proportion as they themselves value them.  And in this there is nothing wonderful.  The more logically and ingeniously men reason from premises, of which the one most essential to their conclusions is radically false to fact, the more punctually on every critical occasion is this fallacy bound to reassert itself as the logical basis of that which they desire to prove.

The question, however, still remains to be answered of why a large body of men, like the educated apostles of socialism, who exhibit as a class no typical inferiority of intellect, unite in accepting, as though drawn to it by some chemical affinity, one particular error which dispassionate common-sense disdains, and which the actual history of the whole human race refutes?  In the case of some preachers of socialism the answer lies on the surface.  Socialism is of all creeds that which it is easiest to present to the ignorant; and in these days, like “patriotism” in the days of Dr. Johnson, it is often “the last refuge of a scoundrel,” or of a desperate and ambitious fool.  But I here put such cases altogether aside.  What I here have in view are men who are morally and intellectually honest, and many of whom, indeed, are intellectually above the average.  How is the affinity for one common error, and the passionate promulgation of it in forms, many of which are conflicting, to be accounted for in the case of men like these?

The answer to this is to be found, not in their intellect, but in their temperament.  It is a well-known fact that men, otherwise of high capacity, are incapable of mastering any but the humblest branches of mathematics.  With the men who become socialists the case is closely similar.  Just as certain men are incapable of dealing with the abstractions of mathematics, so are the socialists men who, in virtue of their constitutions or temperaments, are incapable of comprehending accurately the concrete facts of life, and are consequently as unable with any practical accuracy, to reason about them as a professor of mathematics would be to reason about the value of strawberries, if he knew only their weights or numbers, but had no expert judgment with regard to their condition or quality.

To ascertain how the socialistic temperament thus debilitates the faculties, it will be enough to note certain characteristics distinctive of those possessing it.  Such persons are all distinguished, though naturally in various degrees, by an undue preponderance of the emotional over the critical faculties, whence there arises in them what, to borrow a phrase of President Roosevelt’s, we may aptly call an inflammation of the social sympathies.  This makes such persons magnify into intolerable wrongs all sorts of pains and inconveniences which most men accept as part of the “rough and tumble” of life; and it thus renders them abnormally impatient of the actual,