and Mr. Sidney Webb are prominent,
express themselves in even plainer terms with regard to the part which
directive ability, as opposed to labour, plays in the modern world.
"Ability," says Mr. Shaw, employing the very word, is often the factor
which determines whether a given industry shall make a loss of five per
cent. or else a profit of twenty; and Mr. Webb, as we shall have
occasion to see presently, carries the argument further, and states it
in greater detail.

Why, then, it may be asked, should a critic of contemporary socialism
think it worth while to expose with so much minuteness a fallacy which
intellectual socialists now all agree in repudiating, and to insist with
such emphasis on facts which they profess to recognise as self-evident?
To this question there are two answers.

One of these I indicated at the close of our opening chapter; and this
at the cost of what in logic is a mere digression, it will be desirable,
for practical purposes, to state it with greater fulness.

Admissions and assertions, such as those which I have just now quoted,
do, no doubt, represent a definite intellectual advance which has taken
place in the theory of socialism, among those who are its most
thoughtful exponents, and in a certain sense its leaders. They represent
what these leaders think and say among themselves, and what they put
forward when disputing with opponents who are competent to criticise
them. But what they do not represent is socialism as still preached to
the populace, or the doctrine which is still vital for socialists as a
popular party. This is still, just as it was originally, the socialism
of Marx in an absolutely unamended form. It is the doctrine that the
manual efforts of the vast multitude of labourers, directed only by the
minds of the individual labourers themselves, produce all the wealth of
the world; that the holding of any of this wealth by any other class
whatever stands for nothing but a system of legalised plunder; and that
the labourers need only inaugurate a legislation of a new kind in order
to secure and enjoy what always was by rights their own. Let me
illustrate this assertion by two examples, one supplied to us by
England, the other by America.

In England the body which calls itself the Social Democratic Federation,
and represents at this moment socialism of the more popular kind, began
its campaign with a manifesto which was headed with the familiar words,
"All wealth is due to