world where all alike are poor. For the activity, the push, the
vigor of our modern life, his substitute is a life aimless and
unbroken. And so we have to say to communists what George Eliot
might have said: Be not blinded by the passions of the moment,
but when you prate about your own wrongs and the sufferings of
your offspring, take heed lest in the long run you make a worse
time of it for your own generation, and leave a bad inheritance
for your children.

Little thought has been taken by these altruistic reformers for
the application of the doctrines they uphold. To the question
how one kind of labor can be measured against another, how the
labor of the artisan can be measured against the labor of the
artist, how the labor of the strong can be measured against the
labor of the weak, the communists can give no answer. Absorbed,
as they are, in the principle of equality, they have still
forgotten the equality of work in the equality of pay; they have
forgotten that reward, to be really equal, must be proportionate
to effort; and they and all socialists have forgotten that we
cannot make an arithmetic of human thought and feeling; and that
for all our crude attempts to balance recompense against toil,
for all our crude attempts to determine the relative severity of
different kinds of toil, for all our crude attempts to determine
the relative strain on different persons of the same kind of
toil, yet not only will the ratio, dealing, as it does, with our
subjective feelings, be a blundering one, but a system based upon
it will involve inequalities greater, because more insidious,
than those of the present system it would discard.

Instances, indeed, are not wanting to substantiate the claim that