however. It might elevate but it could not direct. Charles Hall, who published, in 1805, "On the Effects of Civilization on the People in European States," brought the experience of misery into his economic thinking. He argued that four-fifths of the people enjoy only one-eighth of the wealth, the rest going to rent and interest. This was the first definite blow of an economic kind struck at Capitalism. William Thompson followed, in 1824, with his "Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth." To this day, this book has not lost its vitality. Its argument is based on Bentham's economic principles: its conclusions leave not a shred of Benthamism behind. He assumes that value is the creation of labour, and argues that under capitalist conditions wages are determined by subsistence needs, the rest of the product going to land and capital. He grants that a payment should be made for the use of these two, but that it should not exceed the income of the best paid workman. He sees capitalist Society as a mechanism which unjustly abstracts from the working class community the maximum it can from a produce that ought to belong to labour. As a critic, Thompson is modern, as a constructor he is Utopian, and can only suggest as a remedy, freedom of trade, freedom of land transactions, and voluntarily formed co-operative communities on Owenite models.* fessor Foxwell says quite justly of Thompson that "he was the first writer to elevate the question of the just distribution of wealth to the supreme position it has since held in English political economy."

Pro

* A criticism on social institutions which he says he had written, but temporarily withheld from publication lest it might irritate, has been lost.

He certainly laid the unshakable foundation of Socialist economic criticism, and everything that has since been written on the subject, consciously or unconsciously, begins with Thompson. Following him came a cluster of less well known but useful propagandists who, partly as pure economists and partly as agitators, fought the battle against capitalist distribution, explained its mechanism, and thrust its problems right to the forefront of economic discussion.*

The battle for the possession of political economy was won when John Stuart Mill, having been driven out of the "Wages Fund Theory by Thornton, began to "look forward to a time when the division of the produce of labour, instead of depending in so great a degree, as it now does, on the accident of birth, will be made by concert on an acknowledged principle of justice," and wrote that whereas the laws of production were natural and depended upon the properties of objects, “the modes of its Distribution . . . subject to certain conditions, depend on human will." The latter were "but the necessary consequences of particular social arrangements given certain institutions and customs, wages, profits and rent will be determined by certain causes." The present Distribution is bad," he continued, "and the conditions which determine it are "liable to be much altered by the progress of social improvement." English political

* Two ought to be mentioned on account of the influence they had on Karl Marx. The greater of the two was John Francis Bray, who wrote "Labour's Wrongs and Labour's Remedy" (1839); the other was John Gray, whose "Lecture on Human Happiness" (1825) and "The Social System " (1831)-"left little for Marx to add," says Professor Foxwell.

† "Autobiography," pp. 231-2, 246-7.

economy has lost much from the fact that John Stuart Mill does not seem to have been acquainted with the work of these heterodox critics.

KARL MARX

He

The first systematic exposition of Socialist doctrines brought up to his time was that made by Marx not only in his work on Capital," but in letters, memos, manifestoes, and articles which he poured out during his long life of ceaseless strife and controversy. To-day, Marx is known over as wide a world as even Christ or Mohammed. holds a position equal to any one of the few teachers who have founded religious movements. His writings largely unread, are held as inspired, and upon differences of interpretation of what he has said or written, sects of the faithful are founded, and bitter internecine war is carried on. Books and treatises written upon him and his doctrines are legion, and are to be found in every language which commands a printing press. The validity of his economic theories is more than doubtful; his historical philosophy is in the same position. But, as with the great religious teachers, that in no way diminishes the homage paid to him, nor stamps out attempts to regard his word as the last thing that has been said. Such a position is not won except for some good reason, and we have not far to seek for the service which gained for Marx this extraordinary fame. He was the first to give the working classes a hope that, by adopting a certain policy, they would attain to freedom; the policy which he put before them was one which enlivened their spirit, appealed to their intelligences, and set the

lines of their battle just in such a way as to inspire them with the greatest possible fighting zeal, both on account of the rich fruits of the victory that was to be gained and of the steely antagonism against the enemy which it put in their hearts. Marx called, in clear clarion tones, to battle, and made the soldiers feel that it was in an Armageddon that they fought.

Marx began by brushing aside the Utopian and idealistic Socialism of the French school which he found to be prevalent, the Socialism of the little communities with their fantastic rules and their circumscribed life. He, a disciple of Hegel, had a conception of the work of constructive revolution different to that. His parish was no Phalansterie but the world. He dealt with universal processes. His eye swept the whole pageantry of Humanity, and he saw it in its continuous march up through the ages. He interpreted the present by the past, and thus gave it its direction for the future. Thus Marx brought the science and philosophy of his time to aid the working-class struggle, to give it a meaning, a dialectic, and an armoury. In him intellect and revolutionary enthusiasm had a common lodgment, and they together lit fires destined to burn in the hearts of many generations. He combined the idealism of Godwin and the bitter experience of Charles Hall, and by an amalgamation of the one and the other, he produced a historical movement. This was done by no new gospel. The economic criticism of Marx contained no new discoveries, indeed, if plagiarism consisted in saying what has been said by others, the unfounded accusation that Marx plagiarized on his English forerunners, would be true. Marx used a doubtful

economic formula-surplus value-to explain what Thompson had already written, and a doubtful historical formula-economic determinism-to explain social evolution. These things did not give him his position in the history of Socialism. He is there because his work translated an economic criticism into a living movement which lay in Society like a bud in its sheath. His power of personality, his vitality, gave energy to the movement, his intellectual achievements raised its self-confidence, his clear conceptions of method gave it both form and direction, his philosophising gave it a relationship to history, and all these combined made the modern Socialist movement a fighting, a hoping, and a constructing power. Thus Marx became the personal embodiment of the working class revolt against Capitalism and its fight for Socialism.

Marx was born at Treves in 1818, studied at Berlin and Bonn, joined the group of revolutionary journalists contributing to the Rhenish Gazette, published at Cologne, and thus began a career of strife and exile, beaten from pillar to post, until he was received by London, where the thinkers who tried to redeem the world by first of all troubling it, could still find a haven of refuge. There, in company with his friend Frederick Engels, whose work can never be unravelled from Marx's own, he became the centre and the guide of the international working-class movement, studying at the British Museum for his book on "Capital," establishing a network of connexions with Socialist leaders all over the world, and expounding, with partisan zeal and papistic authority, the principles and the tactics upon which the working-classes were to combine in order to free themselves.