Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/284

270 Is it possible, then, to conceive of a state of society where each might be rewarded according to the amount of effort put forth in the service of his fellows? If we could be absolutely certain that everyone would work up to the limits of his powers we might answer "Yes," for then we could introduce absolute equality of distribution. To be sure this innocent-looking term, equality, conceals a nest of difficulties, of which most people have never dreamed. But we can afford to neglect these and turn our attention to more fruitful matters. For, in the first place, all sane persons would agree that an order of society in which everyone worked till exhausted would be the very reverse of ideal, and yet, as will soon appear, short of that the existence of equality of effort can never be demonstrated. But, waiving this, as long as man remains an imperfect being, inequality of effort will always remain a fact to be reckoned with. The first problem will accordingly be the construction of a standard by which to measure the relative amount of such efforts. Now this, it is easy to show, is absolutely impossible. By such a statement we do not merely mean that it would involve difficulties in its practical application, for that is a defect common to all human ideals. Rather do we affirm that the standard in question is incapable of even an intelligible formulation. Time, of course, can be easily measured. But this is only one of three elements involved in determining the amount of genuine desert, the other two being intensity of application and natural indisposition to work. Everyone knows that of two carpenters of apparently equal ability one can accomplish twice or thrice as much in a day as the other, simply because he "works harder." If this is true of manual labor, how much more does it hold of the intellectual activity such as fills the working day of a railroad superintendent! The completeness with which attention is concentrated on his problem for a long period, the strain voluntarily submitted to in order to keep every faculty keyed up to the highest pitch, sometimes makes all the difference between good results and poor. Now this intensity of application there are absolutely no means of measuring. It cannot be estimated