of socialism as understood and accepted by the intelligent disciples, and not the worn-out and discredited theories of Marx.”  Another was good enough to tell me that I had “cleverly accomplished the task of exposing the errors of Marx, both of premise and of logic”; but the leaders of socialistic thought “in its later developments” had, he proceeded to say, long ago outgrown these.  A third wrote me a letter bristling with all kinds of challenges, and asked me if I thought, for example, that socialists were such fools as not to recognise that the talents of an inventor like Mr. Edison increased the productivity of labour by the new direction which they gave to it.  I might multiply similar quotations, but one more will be enough here.  It is taken from a long article directed against myself by Mr. Hillquit—­a writer to whom my special attention was called as by far the most accomplished exponent, among the militant socialists of America, of socialism in its most logical and most highly developed form.  “It requires,” said Mr. Hillquit, “no special genius to demonstrate that all labour is not alike, nor equally productive.  It is still more obvious that common manual labour is impotent to produce the wealth of modern nations—­that organisation, direction, and control are essential to productive work in the field of modern production, and are just as much a factor in it as mere physical effort."[3]

But we need not confine ourselves to my own late critics in America.  The general history of socialism as a reasoned theory is practically the same in one country as in another.  The intellectual socialists in England, among whom Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. Sidney Webb are prominent, express themselves in even plainer terms with regard to the part which directive ability, as opposed to labour, plays in the modern world.  “Ability,” says Mr. Shaw, employing the very word, is often the factor which determines whether a given industry shall make a loss of five per cent. or else a profit of twenty; and Mr. Webb, as we shall have occasion to see presently, carries the argument further, and states it in greater detail.

Why, then, it may be asked, should a critic of contemporary socialism think it worth while to expose with so much minuteness a fallacy which intellectual socialists now all agree in repudiating, and to insist with such emphasis on facts which they profess to recognise as self-evident?  To this question there are two answers.

One of these I indicated at the close of our opening chapter; and this at the cost of what in logic is a mere digression, it will be desirable, for practical purposes, to state it with greater fulness.