The species improves and advances only through the struggle for existence (or preferment). The law of the survival or supremacy of the fittest is immutable in natural conditions. Remove from the petted squirrels the necessity of providing their winter's food, and they become unable to do so when the necessity again arises.
Ambition in competition, carried if you will, to the extreme of cupidity and greed, are instincts as natural as that of self-preservation.
Without the incentive of reward in preferment, power or wealth, we should have no progress. Any enforced leveling of talent or ability would curb and eventually stop human advancement.
Possibly we are advancing too fast; the advance of Socialism may be a working of the natural law of compensation, destined to put a brake upon the wheels of a too rapid progress.
Field, Walter Taylor. (Author.)
I am opposed to such Socialism as emphasizes "class-consciousness" and the entire abolition of private property. True Socialism should make absolutely no distinction between classes, but should hold mankind as a common brotherhood. I am opposed to the entire abolition of private property as removing one of the strongest incentives to labor and progress. We need social reform badly enough, and a check upon inheritances and large accumulations of private property, but I believe the remedy for most of our social evils lies in encouraging the wage-earners to become small farmers and small artisans and in protecting them by stringent legislation against the encroachments of large business.
I am heartily in sympathy with the spirit of Socialism, but not with its methods.