its underlying, fundamental cause is their own inherent faculty for
failure and loss, their incompetence to take and hold the good things of
life. You know the stale old hackneyed cry of the anti-socialists, how it
would be no use equalising conditions because each man would soon return
again to his original state. It's true in a deeper sense than they mean.
You might equalise economic conditions as much as you please, but you'd
never equalise fundamental conditions; you'd never turn the poor into the
rich, the Have-Nots into the Haves. You know I'm not a Socialist. I don't
want to see a futile attempt to throw down barriers and merge all camps
in one indeterminate army who don't know what they mean or where they're
going. I'm not a Socialist, because I don't believe in a universal
outward prosperity. I mean, I don't want it; I should have no use for it.
I'm holding no brief for the rich; I've nothing to say about them just
now; and anyhow you and I have no concern with them." Rodney pulled
himself back from the edge of a topic on which he was apt to become
readily vehement. "But Socialism isn't the way out for them any more than
it's the way out for the poor; it's got, I believe, to be by individual
renunciation that their salvation will come; by their giving up, and
stripping bare, and going down one by one and empty-handed into the
common highways, to take their share of hardness like men. It will be
extraordinarily difficult. Changing one's camp is. It's so difficult as
to be all but impossible. Perhaps you've read the Bible story of the
young man with great possessions, and how it was said, 'With men it is
impossible...' Well, the tradition, true or false, goes that in the end
he did it; gave up his possessions and became financially poor. But we
don't know, even if that's true, what else he kept of his wealth; a good
deal, I daresay, that wasn't money or material goods. One can't tell.
What we do know is that to cross that dividing line, to change one's
camp, is a nearly impossible thing. Someone says, 'That division, the
division of those who have and those who have not, runs so deep as almost