effects in isolation we reach many true conclusions.  But the other motives, with which socialists declare that we must supplement this, are treated by them in a manner so crude, so childish, so incomplete, so deficient in the mere rudiments of scientific analysis, that they do not correspond to anything.  Instead of forming any true addition to the data of economic science, they are like images belonging to the dream of a maudlin school-girl.  They have only the effect of obscuring, not completing, the facts to which the orthodox economists too closely confined themselves, but which, though incomplete, are so far as they go actual.

Now, however, without getting out of touch with the socialists, let us return to firmer ground, and having seen the futility of their attempts to indicate any motive calculated to operate on the monopolists of business ability, other than that supplied under the existing system by the prospect of possessing wealth proportionate to the amount produced by them, let us consider this motive in itself, as history and observation reveal it to us.

And here in the presence of facts which no one seeks to deny, we shall find that the socialists themselves are among our most interesting witnesses, affording in what they assert a solitary and signal exception to that looseness of thought and observation which is otherwise their distinguishing characteristic.  The motive here in question as ascribed to the exceptional wealth-producer, the director, the man of business ability—­the motive which in his case the socialists propose to supersede, but which is at present in possession of the field—­commonly receives from them the vituperative name of “greed.”  What they mean by greed is simply the desire of the great wealth-producer to retain for himself a share of wealth, not necessarily equal, but proportionate, to the amount produced by him.  And what have the socialists got to tell us about greed, when they turn from their plans for superseding it in the socialistic future to consider its operations in the actual past and present?

They tell us a great deal.  For what is, and always has been, their stock moral indictment against the typical men of ability, the pioneers of commerce, the capitalistic directors of labour, the introducers of new inventions, the amplifiers of the world’s wealth?  Their chief indictment against such men has been this—­that their exceptional ability, instead of being roused into action solely by the pleasure of benefiting their fellow-men, has been utterly dead and irresponsive to every stimulus but one; and that this has been personal greed, and personal greed alone.  Its influence, they say, is as old as civilisation itself, and was as operative in the days when the prows of the Tyrian traders first ploughed their way beyond the pillars of Hercules, as it is to-day under the smoke-clouds of Manchester, of Pittsburg, and Chicago.  Karl Marx for example, in a very interesting passage written in England about the time