ocess of becoming the "Bible of the working classes," "Capital"
suffered the fate of all such "Bibles." The spirit of ecclesiastical
dogmatism was transfused into the religion of revolutionary Socialism.
This dogmatic religious quality has been noted by many of the most
observant critics of Socialism. Marx was too readily accepted as the
father of the church, and "Capital" as the sacred gospel of the social
revolution. All questions of tactics, of propaganda, of class warfare,
of political policy, were to be solved by apt quotations from the "good
book." New thoughts, new schemes, new programs, based upon tested fact
and experience, the outgrowth of newer discoveries concerning the nature
of men, upon the recognition of the mistakes of the master, could only
be approved or admitted according as they could or could not be tested
by some bit of text quoted from Marx. His followers assumed that Karl
Marx had completed the philosophy of Socialism, and that the duty of
the proletariat thenceforth was not to think for itself, but merely to
mobilize itself under competent Marxian leaders for the realization of
his ideas.

From the day of this apotheosis of Marx until our own, the "orthodox"
Socialist of any shade is of the belief that the first essential for
social salvation lies in unquestioning belief in the dogmas of Marx.

The curious and persistent antagonism to Birth Control that began with
Marx and continues to our own day can be explained only as the utter
refusal or inability to consider humanity in its physiological and
psychological aspects--these aspects, apparently, having no place in the
"economic interpretation of history." It has remained for George Bernard
Shaw, a Socialist with a keener spiritual insight than the
ordinary Marxist, to point out the disastrous consequences of rapid
multiplication which are obvious to the small cultivator, the peasant
proprietor, the lowest farmhand himself, but which seem to arouse the
orthodox, intellectual Marxian to inordinate fury. "But indeed the
more you degrade the workers," Shaw once wrote,(3) "robbing them of all
artistic enjoyment, and all chance of respect and admiration from their
fellows, the more you throw them back, reckless, upon the one pleasure
and the one human tie left to them--the gratification of their instinct
for producing fresh supplies of men. You will applaud this instinct
as divine until at last the excessive supply becomes a nuisance: there
comes a