But even without such experiments, one can confidently assert that, with men striving after personal welfare, such an organisation cannot be realised, because those men—very many of them—who will superintend economic affairs, will be men with strivings after personal welfare, and will have to deal with similar men, and therefore in organising and maintaining the new economic order, they will inevitably prosecute their own personal advantage as much as the former administrators, and will thus destroy the meaning of the very work they are called to do.
Some will say, "Choose men who are wise and pure." But none but the wise and pure can choose the wise and pure. And if all men were wise and pure, there would be no need of any organisation, consequently the impossibility of that which the revolutionary Socialists profess is felt by all, even by themselves; and that is why it is out of date and has no success.
And here we come to the third teaching—that of Christian Socialism, which has resource to propaganda aiming at influencing the consciousness of men. But the success of this teaching is evidently possible only when all men will have the same clear consciousness of the advantages of community of labour, and when this consciousness will have simultaneously developed in all. But as it is evident that neither the one nor the other can take place, the economic organisation founded, not on competition and struggle,
