At the end of an address in which I had been dealing with this subject at New York, a young man, one of my hearers, told me that I had been putting into words what had long been borne in on himself by his own studies and observations—­the fact, namely, that the social leaders of men are divided into two classes, those who dream about reforming the industrial business of the world, and those, an opposite type, who alone advance and accomplish it.  Here we have the conclusion of the whole matter.  These two classes are contrasted, not because in mere intellect one is inferior to the other, but because when they are dealing with the industrial affairs of life these affairs appeal to them in two contrasted ways.  One of these classes takes men and nature as they are.  With the utmost minuteness it masters the secrets of the latter, with the utmost minuteness it directs the actions of the former; and in seeking wealth for itself it brings about those conditions which alone can make added wealth a practical possibility for all.  The other class, occupied not with what is but what ought to be, fails to understand what can be, because it does not understand what is.  The men of whom this class is composed—­the men whose temperamental deficiency now finds its fullest expression in socialism, as it did formerly in theories of ultra-democratic individualism, are like amateur architects, and amateur sanitary engineers, who, thinking in pictures, and having no knowledge of structure, condemn existing houses and existing systems of drainage, and would replace them with palaces which no builder could build, with arches which would collapse from the weight of their own materials, and magnificent cloacae the waters in which would have to run uphill.

The theory, then, of socialism, let it take what form it will—­the theory which represents as practicable by one device or another the social equalisation of economically unequal men—­is a theory which, in minds which are intellectually honest, can develop itself only in proportion as these minds are incapable of grasping in their connected completeness the actual facts of life; and that such is the case has been illustrated in the preceding chapters by a systematic analysis of all the crucial arguments on which socialists have rested their case from the earliest day of socialistic thought to the latest.

The reader, however, must observe the manner in which this statement is qualified.  In speaking of the arguments of the socialists, I speak of those that are crucial only—­that is to say, of those arguments used by socialistic thinkers in support of their programme in so far as that programme is peculiar.  It is necessary to note this because, as a matter of fact, with such of their arguments as are proper to socialism only, the philosophers of socialism and their disciples frequently associate others which are not peculiar to the socialistic scheme at all, but which nevertheless multitudes of men who call themselves socialists regard as being at once the most important and practicable parts of it; and these I have in consequence reserved for separate treatment.  They are three in number, and are as follows: