icies.

The practical outcome of the scientific reasoning of Marx is summed up
in the formula which has figured as the premise and conclusion of every
congress of his followers, of every book or manifesto published by
them, and of every propagandist oration uttered by them at
street-corners, namely, "All wealth is produced by labour, therefore to
the labourers all wealth is due"--a doctrine in itself not novel if
taken as a pious generality, but presented by Marx as the outcome of an
elaborate system of economics.

The efficiency of this doctrine as an instrument of agitation is
obvious. It appeals at once to two universal instincts: the instinct of
cupidity and the instinct of universal justice. It stimulates the
labourers to demand more than they receive already, and it stimulates to
demand the more on the ground that they themselves have produced it. It
teaches them that the wealth of every man who is not a manual labourer
is something stolen from themselves which ought to be and which can be
restored to them.

Now, whatever may be the value of such teaching as a contribution to
economic science, it illustrates by its success one cardinal truth, and
by implication it bears witness to another. The first truth is that, no
matter how desirable any object may be which is obtruded on the
imagination of anybody, nobody will bestir himself in a practical way to
demand it until he can be persuaded to believe that its attainment is
practically possible. The other is this: that the possibilities of
redistributing wealth depend on the causes by which wealth is produced.
All wealth, says Marx, can practically be appropriated by the
labourers. But why? Because the labourers themselves comprise in their
own labour all the forces that produce it. If its production
necessitated the activity of any persons other than themselves, these
other persons would inevitably have some control over its distribution;
since if it were distributed in a manner of which these other persons
disapproved, it would be open to them to refuse to take part in its
production any longer; and there would, in consequence, be no wealth, or
less wealth, to distribute.

Let us, then, examine the precise sense and manner in which this theory
of labour as the sole producer of wealth is elaborated and defended by
Marx in his Bible of Scientific Socialism. His argument, though the
expression of it is very often pedantic and encumbered with superfluous
mathematic