labour; therefore to the labourer all wealth is
due." This text or motto was followed by certain figures, with regard to
the total income of Great Britain, and the manner in which it is at
present distributed. Labour was represented as getting less than
one-fourth of the whole, and the labourers were informed that if they
would but "educate themselves, agitate, and organise," the remaining
three-fourths would automatically pass into their possession. This
document, it is true, was issued some twenty years ago;[4] but that the
form which socialism takes, when addressed to the masses of the
population, has not appreciably altered from that day to this, will be
made sufficiently clear by the following pertinent fact. Shortly after
my arrival in America, in the winter of 1907, the most active
disseminator of socialistic literature in New York sent me, by way of a
challenge, a new and very spruce volume, which contained the most
important of his previous leaflets and articles, collected and
republished, and claiming renewed attention. The first of these--and it
was signalised by an accompanying advertisement as fundamental--bore the
impressive title of, "Why the Working Man should be a Socialist," and
the answer to this question is given in the writer's opening words. "You
know," he says, addressing any labourer and the street-worker, "or you
ought to know, that you alone produce all the good things of life; and
you know, or you ought to know, that by so simple a process as that of
casting your ballot intelligently you will be able"--to do what? The
writer explains himself in language which, except for a difference in
his statistics, is almost a verbal repetition of that of his English
predecessors. He specifies two sums, one representing the income which
each working-man in America would receive were the entire wealth of the
country divided equally among the manual labourers; the other
representing the income which, on an average, he actually receives as
wages; and the writer tells every working man that, by "merely casting
his ballot intelligently," he can secure for himself the whole
difference between the larger sum and the less.[5]

But the fact that the Marxian doctrine of the all-productivity of
labour, and the consequent economic nullity of all other forms of
effort, still supplies the main ideas by which popular socialism is
vitalised, is shown perhaps even more distinctly by the popular hopes
and demands which resu