accomplish them, on the ground that majorities are, if they would only
realise it, capable of moulding society in any manner they please. As
applied to matters of legislation and government, this theory is
sufficiently familiar to everybody. It has been elaborated in endless
detail, and has expressed itself in the constitutions of all modern
democracies. What Karl Marx did, and did for the first time, was to
invest this theory of the all-efficiency of the majority with a
definiteness, in respect of distribution of wealth, similar to that with
which it had been invested already in respect of the making of laws and
the dictation of national policies.

The practical outcome of the scientific reasoning of Marx is summed up
in the formula which has figured as the premise and conclusion of every
congress of his followers, of every book or manifesto published by
them, and of every propagandist oration uttered by them at
street-corners, namely, "All wealth is produced by labour, therefore to
the labourers all wealth is due"--a doctrine in itself not novel if
taken as a pious generality, but presented by Marx as the outcome of an
elaborate system of economics.

The efficiency of this doctrine as an instrument of agitation is
obvious. It appeals at once to two universal instincts: the instinct of
cupidity and the instinct of universal justice. It stimulates the
labourers to demand more than they receive already, and it stimulates to
demand the more on the ground that they themselves have produced it. It
teaches them that the wealth of every man who is not a manual labourer
is something stolen from themselves which ought to be and which can be
restored to them.

Now, whatever may be the value of such teaching as a contribution to