Estimate of the results which would arise in the latter case.  The state, as representing the average opinion of the masses, brought to bear on scientific industrial enterprise.  Illustrations.

        The state as sole printer and publisher.  State capitalism would
        destroy the machinery of industrial progress just as it would
        destroy the machinery by which thought and knowledge develop.

But behind the question of whether socialism could provide ability with the conditions or the machinery requisite for its exercise is the question of whether it could provide it with any adequate stimulus.

CHAPTER VIII

        Theultimate difficulty. 
        Speculative attempts to minimise it

        Mr. Sidney Webb, and most modern socialists of the higher kind,
        recognise that this problem of motive underlies all others.

        They approach it indirectly by sociological arguments borrowed
        from other philosophers, and directly by a psychology peculiar
        to themselves.

        The sociological arguments by which socialists seek to minimise
        the claims of the able man.

These founded on a specific confusion of thought, which vitiated the evolutionary sociology of that second half of the nineteenth century.  Illustrations from Herbert Spencer, Macaulay, Mr. Kidd, and recent socialists.

        The confusion in question a confusion between speculative truth
        and practical.

The individual importance of the able man, untouched by the speculative conclusions of the sociological evolutionists, as may be seen by the examples adduced in a contrary sense by Herbert Spencer.  This is partially perceived by Spencer himself.  Illustrations from his works.

        Ludicrous attempts, on the part of socialistic writers, to apply
        the speculative generalisations of sociology to the practical
        position of individual men.

        The climax of absurdity reached by Mr. Sidney Webb.

CHAPTER IX

        Theultimate difficulty, continued.
        Ability and individual motive

        The individual motives of the able man as dealt with directly by
        modern socialists.

They abandon their sociological ineptitudes altogether, and betake themselves to a psychology which they declare to be scientific, but which is based on no analysis of facts, and consists really of loose assumptions and false analogies.

        Their treatment of the motives of the artist, the thinker, the
        religious enthusiast, and the soldier.

        Their unscientific treatment of the soldier’s motive, and their
        fantastic proposal based on it to transfer this motive from the
        domain of war to that of industry.