All men ought to work in order to live, but each ought to devote himself to the kind of labor which best suits his peculiar aptitudes.  An injurious waste of strength and abilities would thus be avoided, and labor would cease to be repugnant, and would become agreeable and necessary as a condition of physical and moral health.

And when all have given to society the labor best suited to their innate and acquired aptitudes, each has a right to the same rewards, since each has equally contributed to that solidarity of labor which sustains the life of the social aggregate and, in solidarity with it, the life of each individual.

The peasant who digs the earth performs a kind of labor in appearance more modest, but just as necessary, useful and meritorious as that of the workman who builds a locomotive, of the mechanical engineer who improves it or of the savant who strives to extend the bounds of human knowledge in his study or laboratory.

The one essential thing is that all the members of society work, just as in the individual organism all the cells perform their different functions, more or less modest in appearance—­for example, the nerve-cells, the bone-cells or the muscular cells—­but all biological functions, or sorts of labor, equally useful and necessary to the life of the organism as a whole.

In the biological organism no living cell remains inactive, and the cell obtains nourishment by material exchanges only in proportion to its labor; in the social organism no individual ought to live without working, whatever form his labor may take.

In this way the majority of the artificial difficulties that our opponents raise against socialism may be swept aside.

“Who, then, will black the boots under the socialist regime?” demands M. Richter in his book so poor in ideas, but which becomes positively grotesque when it assumes that, in the name of social equality the “grand chancellor” of the socialist society will be obliged, before attending to the public business, to black his own boots and mind his own clothes!  In truth, if the adversaries of socialism had nothing but arguments of this sort, discussion would indeed be needless.

But all will want to do the least fatiguing and most agreeable kinds of work, says some one with a greater show of seriousness.

I will answer that this is equivalent to demanding to-day the promulgation of a decree as follows:  Henceforth all men shall be born painters or surgeons!

The distribution to the proper persons of the different kinds of mental and manual labor will be effected in fact by the anthropological variations in temperament and character, and there will be no need to resort to monkish regulations (another baseless objection to socialism).

Propose to a peasant of average intelligence to devote himself to the study of anatomy or of the penal code or, inversely, tell him whose brain is more highly developed than his muscles to dig the earth, instead of observing with the microscope.  They will each prefer the labor for which they feel themselves best fitted.