d more keenly_.

"The class struggle," he writes, "becomes more bitter the longer it
lasts. The more capable of struggle the opponents become in and through
the struggle itself, _the more important become the differences in their
conditions of life, the more the capitalists raise themselves above the
proletariat by the ever growing exploitation_."[209]

This feature of present-day (capitalistic) progress, Socialists view as
the very essence of social injustice, no matter whether there is a
slight and continuous or even a considerable progress of the working
class. The question for them is not whether from time to time something
more falls to the workingman, but what proportion he gets of the total
product. It would never occur to any one to try to tell a business man
that he ought not to sell any more goods because his profits were
already increasing "fast enough." It is as absurd to tell the workingman
that the moderate advance he is making either through slight
improvements as to wages and hours, or through political and social
reforms, ought to blind him to all the possibilities of modern
civilization from which he is still shut off, and which will remain out
of his reach for generations, unless his share in the income of society
is rapidly increased to the point that he (and other non-capitalist
producers) receive the total product.

The conflict of class interests is not a mere theory, but a widely
recognized reality, and the worst accusation that can be made against
Socialists is not that they are trying to create a war of classes where
none exists, but that some of them at times interpret the conflict in a
narrow or violent sense (I shall discuss the truth or untruth of this
criticism in later chapters). Yet Mr. Roosevelt voices the opinion of
many when he calls the view that the maximum of progress is to be
secured only after a struggle between the classes, the "most mischievous
of Socialist theses," says that an appeal to class interest is not
"legitimate," and that the Socialists hope "in one shape or another to
profit at the expense of the other citizens of the Republic."[210]

"There is no greater need to-day," said Mr. Roosevelt in his Sorbonne
lecture, "than the need to keep ever in mind the fact that the cleavage
between right and wrong, between good citizenship and bad citizenship,
runs at right angles to, not parallel to, the lines of cleavage between
class and class, between occupation and occupatio