the new factory; their looms,
by being superseded, were virtually taken away from them; and these men,
formerly their own masters, working with their own implements, and
living by the sale of their own individual products, were compelled to
pass under the sway of a novel class, the capitalists; to work with
implements owned by the capitalists, not themselves; and to live by the
wages of their labour, not by their sale of the products of it.

Such, as the socialists insist, was the rise of the capitalistic system;
and when once it had been adequately organised, as it first was, in
England, it proceeded, they go on to observe, to spread itself with
astonishing rapidity, all other methods disappearing before it, through
their own comparative inefficiency. But when socialists or their
opponents turn from capitalism to socialism, and speak of how socialism
has risen and spread likewise, their language, as thus applied, has no
meaning whatever unless it is interpreted in a totally new sense. For in
the sense in which socialists speak of the rise and spread of
capitalism, socialism has, up to the present time, if we except a number
of small and unsuccessful experiments, never risen or spread or had any
existence at all. Capitalism rose and spread as an actual working
system, which multiplied and improved the material appliances of life in
a manner beyond the reach of the older system displaced by it. It
realised results of which previously mankind had hardly dreamed.
Socialism, on the other hand, has risen and spread thus far, not as a
system which is threatening to supersede capitalism by its actual
success as an alternative system of production, but merely as a theory
or belief that such an alternative is possible. Let us take any country
or any city we please--for example, let us say Chicago, in which
socialism is said to be achieving its most hopeful or most formidable
triumphs--and we shall look in vain for a sign that the general
productive process has been modified by socialistic principles in any
particular whatsoever. Socialism has produced resolutions at endless
public meetings; it has produced discontent and strikes; it has hampered
production constantly. But socialism has never inaugurated an improved
chemical process; it has never bridged an estuary or built an ocean
liner; it has never produced or cheapened so much as a lamp or a
frying-pan. It is a theory that such things could be accomplished by the
practical