. Writing as he did,
almost half a century ago, he said that the process of capitalistic
appropriation had not--yet completed itself. A remnant of producers on a
restricted scale survived, still forming a middle class, which was
neither rich nor poor. But, he continued, in all capitalistic countries,
a new movement, inevitable from the first, had set in, and its pace was
daily accelerating. Just as the earlier capitalists swallowed up most of
the small producers, so were the great capitalists swallowing up the
smaller, and the middle class which survived was disappearing day by
day. Wages, meanwhile, were regulated by an iron law. Under the system
of capitalism it was an absolute impossibility that they could rise. As
he put it, in language which has since become proverbial, "The rich are
getting richer, the poor poorer, the middle class is being crushed out,"
and the time, he continued, was in sight already--it would arrive,
according to him, before the end of the nineteenth century--when nothing
would be left but a handful of idle and preposterous millionaires on the
one hand, and a mass of miserable ragamuffins who provided all the
millions on the other, having for themselves only enough food and
clothing to enable them to move their muscles and protect their
nakedness from the frost. Then, said Marx, when this contrast has
completed itself, the situation will be no longer tolerable. "Then the
knell of the capitalistic system will have sounded." The producers will
assert themselves under the pressure of an irresistible impulse; they
will repossess themselves of the implements of production of which they
have been so long deprived. "The expropriators will in their turn be
expropriated," and the labourers thenceforth owning the implements of
production collectively, all the wealth of the world will forever
afterwards be theirs.

This concluding portion of the gospel of Marx--its prophecies--has been
in many of its details so completely falsified by events that even his
most ardent disciples no longer insist on it. I have only mentioned it
here because of the further light which it throws on what alone, in
this discussion, concerns us--namely, the Marxian theory of labour as
the sole producer of wealth, and the absolute nullity, so far as
production goes, of every form of activity associated with the
possession of capital, or with any class but the labouring.

This theory of production, then, which has been the foundat