The
effort equitably to adjust compensation to earnings is ultimately not
only impossible, but undesirable, because it necessarily would foul the
whole economic organization--so far as its efficiency depended on a
generous rivalry among individuals. The only way in which work can be
made entirely disinterested is to adjust its compensation to the needs
of a normal and wholesome human life.
Any substantial progress towards the attainment of complete individual
disinterestedness is far beyond the reach of contemporary collective
effort, but such disinterestedness should be clearly recognized as the
economic condition both of the highest fulfillment which democracy can
bestow upon the individual and of a thoroughly wholesome democratic
organization. Says Mr. John Jay Chapman in the chapter on "Democracy,"
in his "Causes and Consequences": "It is thought that the peculiar merit
of democracy lies in this: that it gives every man a chance to pursue
his own ends. The reverse is true. The merit lies in the assumption
imposed upon every man that he shall serve his fellow-men.
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