It is not correct, then, to assert that socialism demands for all citizens material and actual equality of labor and rewards.

The only possible equality is equality of obligation to work in order to live, with a guarantee to every laborer of conditions of existence worthy of a human being in exchange for the labor furnished to society.

Equality, according to socialism—­as Benoit Malon said[5]—­is a relative thing, and must be understood in a two-fold sense:  1st, All men, as men, must be guaranteed human conditions of existence; 2d, All men ought to be equal at the starting point, ought not to be handicapped, in the struggle for life, in order that each may freely develop his own personality in an environment of equality of social conditions, while to-day a child, sound and healthy, but poor, goes to the wall in competition with a child puny but rich.[6]

This is what constitutes the radical, immeasurable transformation that socialism demands, but that it also has discovered and announces as an evolution—­already begun in the world around us—­that will be necessarily, inevitably accomplished in the human society of the days to come.[7]

This transformation is summed up in the conversion of private or individual ownership of the means of production, i. e. of the physical foundation of human life (land, mines, houses, factories, machinery, instruments of labor or tools, and means of transportation) into collective or social ownership, by means of methods and processes which I will consider further on.

From this point we will consider it as proven that the first objection of the anti-socialist reasoning does not hold, since its starting-point is non-existent.  It assumes, in short, that contemporary socialism aims at a chimerical physical and mental equality of all men, when the fact is that scientific and fact-founded socialism never, even in a dream, thought of such a thing.

Socialism maintains, on the contrary, that this inequality—­though greatly diminished under a better social organization which will do away with all the physical and mental imperfections that are the cumulative results of generations of poverty and misery—­can, nevertheless, never disappear for the reasons that Darwinism has discovered in the mysterious mechanism of life, in other words on account of the principle of variation that manifests itself in the continuous development of species culminating in man.

In every social organization that it is possible to conceive, there will always be some men large and others small, some weak and some strong, some phlegmatic and some nervous, some more intelligent, others less so, some superior in mental power, others in muscular strength; and it is well that it should be so; moreover, it is inevitable.

It is well that this is so, because the variety and inequality of individual aptitudes naturally produce that division of labor that Darwinism has rightly declared to be a law of individual physiology and of social economy.