he died an exile in England.

"I'll tell you a way to get rid of the surplus," Ernest said. "Throw it
into the sea. Throw every year hundreds of millions of dollars' worth
of shoes and wheat and clothing and all the commodities of commerce into
the sea. Won't that fix it?"

"It will certainly fix it," Mr. Calvin answered. "But it is absurd for
you to talk that way."

Ernest was upon him like a flash.

"Is it a bit more absurd than what you advocate, you machine-breaker,
returning to the antediluvian ways of your forefathers? What do you
propose in order to get rid of the surplus? You would escape the problem
of the surplus by not producing any surplus. And how do you propose
to avoid producing a surplus? By returning to a primitive method of
production, so confused and disorderly and irrational, so wasteful and
costly, that it will be impossible to produce a surplus."

Mr. Calvin swallowed. The point had been driven home. He swallowed again
and cleared his throat.

"You are right," he said. "I stand convicted. It is absurd. But we've
got to do something. It is a case of life and death for us of the middle
class. We refuse to perish. We elect to be absurd and to return to the
truly crude and wasteful methods of our forefathers. We will put back
industry to its pre-trust stage. We will break the machines. And what
are you going to do about it?"

"But you can't break the machines," Ernest replied. "You cannot make the
tide of evolution flow backward. Opposed to you are two great forces,
each of which is more powerful than you of the middle class. The large
capitalists, the trusts, in short, will not let you turn back. They
don't want the machines destroyed. And greater than the trusts, and
more powerful, is labor. It will not let you destroy the machines. The
ownership of the world, along with the machines, lies between the
trusts and labor. That is the battle alignment. Neither side wants
the destruction of the machines. But each side wants to possess the
machines. In this battle the middle class has no place. The middle class
is a pygmy between two giants. Don't you see, you poor perishing middle
class, you are caught between the upper and nether millstones, and even
now has the grinding begun.

"I have demonstrated to you mathematically the inevitable breakdown of
the capitalist system. When every country stands with an unconsumed and
unsalable surplus on its hands, the capitalist system will break down