you know, or you ought to know, that by so simple a process as that of
casting your ballot intelligently you will be able"--to do what? The
writer explains himself in language which, except for a difference in
his statistics, is almost a verbal repetition of that of his English
predecessors. He specifies two sums, one representing the income which
each working-man in America would receive were the entire wealth of the
country divided equally among the manual labourers; the other
representing the income which, on an average, he actually receives as
wages; and the writer tells every working man that, by "merely casting
his ballot intelligently," he can secure for himself the whole
difference between the larger sum and the less.[5]

But the fact that the Marxian doctrine of the all-productivity of
labour, and the consequent economic nullity of all other forms of
effort, still supplies the main ideas by which popular socialism is
vitalised, is shown perhaps even more distinctly by the popular hopes
and demands which result from this doctrine indirectly than it is by the
direct reassertion of the formal doctrine itself. One of the members of
the Parliamentary Labour party in England celebrated his success at the
polls by a letter to the _Times_, proclaiming that socialism was a
moral quite as much as an economic movement, and that an object which to
socialists was dearer even than the seizure of the riches of the rich,
was the achievement of "economic freedom," or, in other words, the
"emancipation of labour," or, in other words again, the abolition of the
system which he described as "wagedom." I merely mention the particular
letter in question in order to remind the reader of these familiar
phrases, which are current in every country where the theory of
socialism has spread itself.

Now, what does all this talk about the emancipation of labour mean? It