but to work within the walls of that mill or starve; and the possessing class at large has become like the owner of such a single mill, who, holding the keys of life and death in his hands, is able to impose on the mill-workers almost any terms he pleases as the price of admission to his premises and to the privilege of using his machinery; and the price which such an owner, so situated, will exact (such was the contention of Marx) inevitably must come, and historically has come, to this—­namely, the entire amount of goods which the labouring class produces, except such a minimum as will just enable its members to keep themselves in working order, and to reproduce their kind.  Thus all capital, as at present owned, all profits, and all interest on capital, are neither more nor less than thefts from the labouring class of commodities which are produced by the labouring class alone.

The argument of Marx is not, however, finished yet.  There remains a third part of it which we still have to consider.  Writing as he did, almost half a century ago, he said that the process of capitalistic appropriation had not—­yet completed itself.  A remnant of producers on a restricted scale survived, still forming a middle class, which was neither rich nor poor.  But, he continued, in all capitalistic countries, a new movement, inevitable from the first, had set in, and its pace was daily accelerating.  Just as the earlier capitalists swallowed up most of the small producers, so were the great capitalists swallowing up the smaller, and the middle class which survived was disappearing day by day.  Wages, meanwhile, were regulated by an iron law.  Under the system of capitalism it was an absolute impossibility that they could rise.  As he put it, in language which has since become proverbial, “The rich are getting richer, the poor poorer, the middle class is being crushed out,” and the time, he continued, was in sight already—­it would arrive, according to him, before the end of the nineteenth century—­when nothing would be left but a handful of idle and preposterous millionaires on the one hand, and a mass of miserable ragamuffins who provided all the millions on the other, having for themselves only enough food and clothing to enable them to move their muscles and protect their nakedness from the frost.  Then, said Marx, when this contrast has completed itself, the situation will be no longer tolerable.  “Then the knell of the capitalistic system will have sounded.”  The producers will assert themselves under the pressure of an irresistible impulse; they will repossess themselves of the implements of production of which they have been so long deprived.  “The expropriators will in their turn be expropriated,” and the labourers thenceforth owning the implements of production collectively, all the wealth of the world will forever afterwards be theirs.