It is a well-known fact that men, otherwise of high capacity, are incapable of mastering any but the humblest branches of mathematics.

With the men who become socialists the case is closely similar.

Just as certain men are incapable of dealing with the abstractions of mathematics, so are the socialists men who, in virtue of their constitutions or temperaments, are incapable of comprehending accurately the concrete facts of life, and are consequently as unable with any practical accuracy, to reason about them as a professor of mathematics would be to reason about the value of strawberries, if he knew only their weights or numbers, but had no expert judgment with regard to their condition or quality.
To ascertain how the socialistic temperament thus debilitates the faculties, it will be enough to note certain characteristics distinctive of those possessing it.

Such persons are all distinguished, though naturally in various degrees, by an undue preponderance of the emotional over the critical faculties, whence there arises in them what, to borrow a phrase of President Roosevelt's, we may aptly call an _inflammation_ of the social sympathies.

This makes such persons magnify into intolerable wrongs all sorts of pains and inconveniences which most men accept as part of the "rough and tumble" of life; and it thus renders them abnormally impatient of the actual, and abnormally preoccupied with the ideal.