apitalist society. Marx, however, does not appear to have been directly
influenced by it to any extent. That he was influenced by it indirectly,
through William Thompson, Godwin's most illustrious disciple, is,
however, quite certain. Thompson wrote several works of a Socialist
character, of which "An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution
of Wealth most Conducive to Human Happiness, Applied to the newly
proposed System of Voluntary Equality of Wealth," 1824, and "Labour
Rewarded. The Claims of Labour and Capital Conciliated, or How to Secure
to Labour the Whole Products of its Exertions," 1827, are the most
important and best known. Thompson must be regarded as one of the
greatest precursors of Marx in the development of modern Socialist
theory. A Ricardian of the Ricardians, he states the law of wages in
language that is almost as emphatic as Lassalle's famous _Ehernes
Lohngesetz_, which Marx made the butt of his satire.[141] Accepting the
view of Ricardo,--and indeed, of Adam Smith and other earlier English
economists, including Petty,--that labor is the sole source of exchange
value,[142] he shows by cogent argument the exploitation of the laborer,
and uses the term "surplus value" to designate the difference between
the cost of maintaining the laborer and the value of his labor product,
assisted, of course, by machinery and other capital, which goes to the
capitalist. By a most labored argument, Professor Anton Menger has
attempted to create the impression that Marx took, without
acknowledgment, his _theory of the manner in which surplus value is
produced_ from Thompson, simply because Thompson frequently used the
_term itself_.[143] Marx never claimed to have originated the term. It
is to be found in the writings of earlier economists than Thompson even,
and Marx quotes an anonymous pamphlet entitled _The Source and Remedy of
the National Difficulties_. _A Letter to Lord John Russell_, published
in London in 1821, in which the phrase "the quantity of the surplus
value appropriated by the capitalist" appears.[144] Nor did Marx claim
to be the first to distinguish surplus value. That had been done very
clearly by many others, including Adam Smith.[145] What is original in
Marx is the explanation of the manner in which surplus value is
produced.

John Gray's "A Lecture on Human Happiness," published in 1825, has been
described by Professor Foxwell as being "certainly one of the most
remarkable of Socialist w