On whatever
argumentative point the socialists, as socialists, lay stress, there,
under one form or another, their root-fallacy reappears. In short, their
arguments are illusionary in proportion as they themselves value them.
And in this there is nothing wonderful. The more logically and
ingeniously men reason from premises, of which the one most essential to
their conclusions is radically false to fact, the more punctually on
every critical occasion is this fallacy bound to reassert itself as the
logical basis of that which they desire to prove.
The question, however, still remains to be answered of why a large body
of men, like the educated apostles of socialism, who exhibit as a class
no typical inferiority of intellect, unite in accepting, as though drawn
to it by some chemical affinity, one particular error which
dispassionate common-sense disdains, and which the actual history of the
whole human race refutes? In the case of some preachers of socialism the
answer lies on the surface. Socialism is of all creeds that which it is
easiest to present to the ignorant; and in these days, like "patriotism"
in the days of Dr.
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