ces of a country comes in conflict with its economic
development, which at the present day is practically true of all
political force, the battle has always ended with the destruction of
the political force. Without exception and inexorably, economic
development has attained its goal. The last most striking example of
which we have already called attention to, the French Revolution. If,
as according to Herr Duehring's teachings, the economic development
and the economic conditions of a certain country are altogether
dependent upon political forces there is no explanation of the fact
that Frederick William IV after 1848 could not succeed, in spite of
his army, in attaching the guilds of the Middle Ages and other
romantic tomfooleries to the steam-engines, railroads and the newly
developing greater industry, or why the Czar who is still much more
powerful could not only not pay his debts but could not collect his
forces without drawing on the credit of the economic conditions of
Western Europe.

According to Herr Duehring force is the absolute evil. The first act
of force is to him the first fall into sin. His whole conception is a
preachment over the infection of all history up to the present time
with the original sin. He talks about the disgraceful falsifying of
all natural and social laws by the invention of the devil, force. That
force plays another role in history, a revolutionary role, that it is
in the words of Marx, the midwife of the old society which is pregnant
with the new, that it is the tool by the means of which social
progress is forwarded, and foolish, dead political forms
destroyed,--of that Herr Duehring has no word to say, only with sighs
and groans does he admit the possibility that force may be necessary
for the overthrow of a thievish economic system. He simply declares
that every application of force demoralizes him who uses it. And this
in spite of the moral and intellectual uplift which has followed every
victorious revolution. He says this in Germany, too, where a powerful
and necessary uprising would at least have the advantage of abolishing
the slavish snobbery of the national mind which has prevailed since
the humiliation of the Thirty Years War. And this foolish and
senseless sort of preaching is set up in opposition to the most
revolutionary party known to history.

_V. Theory of Value._

It is now about a hundred years since a book appeared in Leipsic which
by the beginning of this