Yet again, the notion that poverty and squalor have some mysterious virtue in themselves, expressed in a modified form in eulogies of plain-living and high-thinking, etc, is still prevalent among many who might be supposed to know better. For Socialism, poverty and squalor are unmitigated evils, and a rationally conceived and directed luxury in material things for all alike, is its direct aim. This notion of asceticism, of the virtue of mortifying the flesh, of self-abnegation on the part of the individual, derived from Christian doctrine as interpreted by the Puritanism of the rising small middle-class of former days, is attributed to Socialism as a part of its ethics : is arbitrarily foisted, that is, on to a system of thought for which it has no meaning and in which it has no place. E.