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.