Page:James Ramsay MacDonald - The Socialist Movement.pdf/179

organisation of scientific laboratory and workshop, and the Socialist care to provide equality of opportunity will, unless nature herself fail us, train our brains and produce the ability which is to be rewarded. Our critics are particularly fond of using the argument that such and such a thing is unthinkable and is contrary to human nature, and that argument has to be used by us here. For what we are told by our critics to assume is, that there will be a great production of ability and a provision of the richest opportunities for it to show itself, but that it will yield no results. The demand to believe such a thing is palpably absurd. The intellectual and scientific atmosphere of the Socialist state will be pregnant with discovery, invention, and improvement; ability will be so general that it will not be confined to one class or to one type of mind, and it will therefore be available to all kinds of prompting from monetary award to public honour. To-day, let us assume (though the assumption is not just) that it can be had only at a high monetary price. Under Socialism it will belong to so many that it will exert itself sometimes from the sheer love of exercising itself, sometimes for honours, sometimes for money perhaps; but in any event that it should exist and do nothing is as unthinkable as that the sun should shine without emitting light and heat. There will be places in laboratories, places in workshops, places in the public administrative services, open for it and demanding to be filled. Skill can act as teacher, as experimenter, as foreman, as manager, as