So far as they are concerned, the Old Adam is quite sufficient.
None of us need much converting in order to welcome the prospect of an
indefinite addition to our incomes, which will cost us nothing but the
trouble of stretching out our hands to take it. Socialists often
complain that, under the existing dispensation, there is one law for the
rich and another law for the poor. They propose themselves to introduce
a difference which goes still deeper, and to provide the few and the
many, not only with two laws, but with two different natures, and two
antithetic moralities. The morality of the many is to remain, as it
always has been, comfortably based on the familiar desire for dollars.
The morality of the few is to be based on some hitherto unknown contempt
for them; and the class which the socialists fix upon as the subjects of
this moral transformation, is precisely the class which they denounce as
being, and as always having been, in respect of its devotion to dollars,
the most notorious, and the most notoriously incorrigible.
That arguments such as these, culminating in an absurdity like this, and
starting with the assumption that it is possible to animate a
manufacturer's office with the spirit of soldiers facing an enemy's
guns, should actually emanate from sane men would be unbelievable, if
the arguments were not being repeated from day to day by men who, in
some respects, are far from being incompetent reasoners.
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