become like the owner of such a single mill, who, holding the keys of
life and death in his hands, is able to impose on the mill-workers
almost any terms he pleases as the price of admission to his premises
and to the privilege of using his machinery; and the price which such an
owner, so situated, will exact (such was the contention of Marx)
inevitably must come, and historically has come, to this--namely, the
entire amount of goods which the labouring class produces, except such a
minimum as will just enable its members to keep themselves in working
order, and to reproduce their kind. Thus all capital, as at present
owned, all profits, and all interest on capital, are neither more nor
less than thefts from the labouring class of commodities which are
produced by the labouring class alone.

The argument of Marx is not, however, finished yet. There remains a
third part of it which we still have to consider. Writing as he did,
almost half a century ago, he said that the process of capitalistic
appropriation had not--yet completed itself. A remnant of producers on a
restricted scale survived, still forming a middle class, which was
neither rich nor poor. But, he continued, in all capitalistic countries,
a new movement, inevitable from the first, had set in, and its pace was
daily accelerating. Just as the earlier capitalists swallowed up most of
the small producers, so were the great capitalists swallowing up the
smaller, and the middle class which survived was disappearing day by
day. Wages, meanwhile, were regulated by an iron law. Under the system
of capitalism it was an absolute impossibility that they could rise. As
he put it, in language which has since become proverbial, "The rich are
getting richer, the poor poorer, the middle class is being crushed out,"
and the time, he continued, was in sight already--it would arrive,
according to him, before the end of the nineteenth century--when nothing
would be left but a handful of idle and preposterous millionaires on the