insisting that the undirected labour of the many is, in the modern
world, impotent to produce anything, they continue to speak of it as
though it produced everything, and as though no class other than the
labouring fulfilled any economic function or had any right to exist.[6]


Let me give the reader an example, which is curiously apt here. It is
taken from Mr. Hillquit's own attack on myself, which filled the front
sheet of a newspaper, and was distributed to the public at the door of
one of the buildings in which I spoke. Of the short passages, amounting
to some twenty lines out of six hundred, in which alone he condescended
to detailed argument, the first is that in which, as we have already
seen, he declares that all socialists know, without any instruction on
my part, that common manual labour, unless it is directed by ability, is
"impotent to produce the wealth of modern nations." But having made this
admission with much blowing of trumpets, he immediately drops it, and
instead of developing its consequences, he diverts the attention of his
readers from it by a long series of irrelevancies; nor does he return to
the question of directive ability at all till he is nearing the end of
his discourse, when he suddenly takes it up again, declaring that he
will meet and refute me on ground which I myself have chosen, and show
that wealth--at all events in the commercial sense--is still produced by
manual labour alone. He refers to my selection of the case of a printed
book, as illustrating, in the manner explained in an earlier chapter,
the part which directive ability plays in modern production. The
economic value of an edition of a printed book, I said, as the reader
will remember, depends in the most obvious way, not on the labour of
compositors, but on the quality of the directions which the author
imposes on this labour through his manuscript--the author's mind being
typical of directive ability generally. And what has Mr. Hillquit--the