sometimes have their own opinions on the subject of German Jews and of doctrines derived from them, while subscribers to local libraries are apt to be strict disciplinarians as to the views held by authors whose books are to be read in their family circle. Hinc illa lacrimæ.

If he will forgive me for saying so, Dr. Crozier's whole criticism of Marx is throughout based on what logicians term an ignoratio elenchi. He sets up a terrible bogey purely of his own construction and device which he would have us take to represent Marx, and which he straightway proceeds to hew in pieces with manifold objurgation, in approved style. We expected in this last article, which claims to be a direct challenge to Marx himself, that Dr. Crozier would deal systematically with the main positions of the treatise on Capital, rather than continue to harp upon the one or two deductions of his own which he fastens on to Marx in the course of the articles dealing with his English opponents. In this we have certainly been disappointed. Dr. Crozier, I suppose, might urge as an excuse for repeating himself, that neither Mr. Blatchford nor Mr. Snowden, proud in their ignor'ance of Marx's works, were in a position, or were concerned, to deal with the subject from the Marxian point of view. This being so, it only remains for the present writer to point out in detail the misapprehensions under which Dr. Crozier is labouring on the subject of Marx's teaching, and to endeavour to indicate the fallacy underlying his chief counter-proposition.

Marx shows that value, as the fundamental economic element running through all produced and exchangeable articles of use, is the human labour which has gone to their production. This is, of course, a doctrine Marx has taken over from the old classical British economy. In consequence of the part it plays in Marx's system, this simple and obvious truth recognised by Adam Smith, Ricardo, and all the older theorists, has come to be viewed with 1 abhorrence by the modern bourgeois economist, who is never tired of decrying it as out of date. Now, this principle of value cbeing embodied labour, Marx applies as the touchstone in his analysis of the modern Capitalist system of production. He "points out that the value of wealth produced under the conditions of the great machine-industry of modern times with all the complexity of its processes, is au fond nothing but the "congealed human labour "expressed in it. The complexity of the economic forms may often hide this fact from view, but, as Marx contends, it remains a fact nevertheless. But now steps in our critic. "No," says Dr. Beattie Crozier, "it is not labour, it is not the workman who produces the wealth around us with its value; it is the powers of nature embodied in the machines; these are the real originators of all our wealth." How the machines could produce

wealth by themselves without the application of human labour to them, or how the machines themselves could come into existence save as the product of human labour as applied to the iron, wood, stone, in a word to the raw materials of nature, Dr. Crozier does not tell us. But, after all, it is not so much the machines themselves that interest our learned critic as the inventors of the machines, and thereby hangs a tale. Dr. Beattie Crozier bases his criticism on Marx on the theory that the latter was chiefly concerned in his analysis with the question of "strict economic justice" in the division of the surplus product, over and above what was necessary to the maintenance of the labourer, a division, as Dr. Crozier informs us, whereby each man gets the fruits of his labour, neither more nor less." Hence we are told "it became necessary as a preliminary for him to inquire as to precisely what men or body of men it was to whom this surplus was due, and without whose special exertions it could not have come into being at all." Here, therefore, according to Dr. Crozier, we have the kernel of the Marxian system. Marx, of course, insists that the whole of wealth production, the whole of economic value (and surplus value), is the creation of labour, or, to put the matter concretely, of the workman operating on the products of nature. But herein, says Dr. Crozier, Marx was a subtle deceiver. The real creator, if not of all value, at least of the surplus value, the surplus product, over and above the labourer's means of subsistence, now appropriated by the Capitalist, is neither the labourer nor the Capitalist but the inventor.

Now, before going any further, it may interest Dr. Crozier to learn that his statement of Marx's position would be accepted by no Marxian and would be certainly unrecognisable by Marx himself. The author of Das Kapital was led to his Socialist conclusions as the logical outcome of his analysis of Capitalist production, and was certainly actuated by no intention either beforehand or afterwards, of discovering "strict economic justice" in the division of the surplus whereby each man gets the fruits of his labour, neither more nor less." I defy Dr. Crozier to produce any passage in Marx which would justify the caricature of Marx's position contained in the words above quoted. It is a gloss put upon Marx by Dr. Crozier. The idea of "strict economic justice," in Dr. Crozier's sense, certainly never entered Marx's mind, while as to "each man getting the fruits of his labour, neither more nor less," it requires but a very little consideration of the conditions of modern industry to enable anyone to see such a scheme to be preposterously chimerical. In the complicated processes of modern

production, the impossibility of assigning the precise amount of labour put by any given workman into the finished product, is obvious. If Dr. Beattie Crozier was really under the delusion that Marx was capable of propounding such nonsense as this there may have been some excuse for his thinking him a Utopian Schemer whom he could "dispose of as a serious economist," and for his talk about getting "Marx and his followers under hatches." In fact, Dr. Crozier's latest utterances look as though he were anxious to confirm Hyndman's opinion as quoted by him, as to his understanding of Marx. Take for example the statement that Das Kapital is a book not distinguished for its profundity, but that "on the contrary, as we shall see, it is a most simple and childlike piece of work." Now none of Marx's previous detractors of any mark in political economy, that I am aware of, have denied either depth or acumen to Das Kapital, or have claimed to make their readers see that it is a most simple and childlike piece of work." What we do see, of course, in Dr. Crozier's case, is that, for some reason or other, he has completely missed all the bearings alike of Marx's method and conclusions. If Dr. Crozier asks me to make good the above contention by extracts from Marx's writings, I must respectfully decline to take up the position of proving a negative, more especially as the space at my disposal in the FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW precludes me from quoting the whole of Das Kapital. On the contrary I must, in my turn, call upon Dr. Crozier to justify his interpretation of Marx by the ipsissima verba of Marx himself.

What, then, it may be asked, was the real gist and intention of the labours of Karl Marx? The answer is, Marx took not things as they might be, or things as they ought to be, but things as they were-the Capitalist system, in which we live and move and have our being-as the subject of his investigation and analysis. He did not start with, or call to his aid, any abstract economic man." What he sought to inquire was the meaning of, and implications involved in, the present conditions of production and distribution which we term the Capitalist system. The course of his analysis brings out at once its historical bearings, its roots in the past of the evolution of human society and the tendencies latent within it as regards the future of that evolution. This tendency, he finds, points inevitably to the Communist ownership of the means of production, distri

(1) It may be as well to point out here that the purely bogus opposition, so popular with a certain order of politicians to-day, between evolution and revolution, does not exist for Marx or his followers. They recognise that every revolution forms a part, usually the consummation, of an evolution, and that every evolutionary process contains within itself revolutionary momenta.

bution, and exchange, as the next salient stage in the economic development of society. But for Marx the economic side of human affairs is that side which determines all the rest. A fundamental economic change involves sooner or later a corresponding change in all the other departments of human lifepolitical, religious, juridical, ethical, artistic. It may be that Marx himself, and I certainly think that such is the case with some of his followers, has unduly exaggerated the direct causal efficacy, great as it undoubtedly is, of the economic factor in some aspects of human evolution. With this question I have dealt elsewhere, but whether or not, the point is, for our present purpose, more academic than practical. For the truth, established by Marx-a truth all but unrecognised before his time-of the stupendous import of economic development on human development generally, whether, as with some Marxians, we treat the economic development as the sole cause of the rest, or whether we regard the economic factor and the intellectual factor as co-efficients in a common result (i.e., as reciprocally determining and determined by each other), is alike undeniable. Now of criticism of Marx's method or of any scientific treatment of the results of his analysis, I can find no trace in Dr. Crozier's animadversions. Instead of this he sets up an Aunt Sally of his own, consisting of fragments of Utopian dogma, which he proceeds to demolish.

66

The great pièce de résistance of Dr. Crozier, and also, I believe, of Mr. Mallock, in the attack on Marx, namely, the trotting out of the inventor," can surely not be meant to be taken quite seriously? In the first place the ideas of the inventor do not as such enter into the sphere of economics. Marx found in the great industry, as established, the three factors-the Workman, the Capitalist, and the Machine. He did not find Dr, Crozier's -pet, the inventor, "fooling round" (as Mr. Dooley might say), and, therefore, not being there he was not in a position to get him "huddled away," as alleged by the learned doctor. Marx explains that in the process of Capitalist production, the workman is necessarily docked of a portion of the product of his labour, a portion which may be determined with fair accuracy, in the long run, in the different phases of Capitalist production, although it would be impossible to assess the amount of surplus value of which any given individual workman had been deprived. In estimating the rate of the exploitation of labour by capital we start from economic value as defined by Marx and the older economists, namely, specially useful average labour, simple or compound, as measured on a time basis. Hence the value of the Machine for Marx's purpose is neither the use-value nor the exchange-value, but the economic-value as defined by Marx in the sense I have

just given. Such is my answer to Dr. Crozier's challenge on page 88.

Let us now come back to Marx, not as the analyst of Capitalist production, in other words, not in his capacity as scientific exponent of economic truths, but to Marx, the human agitator for the rights of the working classes, to Marx in his capacity as man 'with ethical impulses and socio-political aspirations. As I have already pointed out, sheer scientific analysis of the conditions of Capitalist production had led Marx to the conclusion that the present system of society must inevitably become transformed into Socialism. This, however, per se, is a purely theoretical deduction. It has, in itself, no immediate ethical or other practical bearing. But Marx was more than a mere theorist, he was also a Social Revolutionist with human sympathies. He desired the realisation of that future human society which scientific analysis showed him was already gestating within the womb of modern Capitalist society, and he desired its realisation as speedily as possible. His economic and historical studies had shown him the Proletariat as the heir of the ages in this connection, and as the class, in and through which the great change should be effected. They taught him further that the entry upon the scene of the Proletariat, as the dominant class, must mean the crucial step towards the abolition of a society based on classes altogether. Now here undoubtedly on the practical side of Marx's activity, the ethical moment, the idea of justice towards a class which since entering the arena of history has been oppressed and disinherited, did play a strong rôle with him. That the producers of wealth have always been those who have been the least enjoyers of wealth is an undoubted fact. This fact, under the conditions of modern Capitalist production, is daily and hourly staring the whole world in the face. But that portion of the world for which writers like Dr. Crozier and Mr. Mallock have taken to themselves a special brief, the portion which has the good fortune to belong to the propertied classes, is very unwilling to recognise in its true bearings this same fact. Hence its advocates are compelled to have resort to subterfuges. Across the great patent fact of injustice inflicted on the working classes by the present system of society it is accordingly sought to draw a red-herring in the shape of an imaginary counter-victim, to wit, the Inventor. Now this poor fellow, it is contended, ought to have the whole increment of wealth produced by the machine-industry over earlier methods of production to his own cheek. It is not the workingman who slaves at laborious toil his eight, nine, or ten hours a day who is unjustly treated by the present system! Oh, dear no! It is a man who, probably by the mere easy and agreeable exercise