intellectual Ajax of the socialists--got to say about this? "Whether a
book," he says, "is a work of genius or mere rubbish will largely affect
its literary or artistic value; but it will have very little bearing on
its economic or commercial value." This, he goes on to argue, will,
despite all my objections, be found to depend on ordinary manual labour,
of which the labour of the hands of the compositors is that which
concerns us most. Nothing, according to him, can be more evident than
this. "For the market price," he says, "of a wretched detective story,
of the same length as Hamlet, and printed in the same way, will be
exactly the same as that of a copy of Hamlet itself."

Now, if we consider Mr. Hillquit as a purely literary critic, we can but
admire his subtlety in discovering that the literary value of a book is
largely affected by the fact of the book's not being rubbish; but when
he descends from pure criticism to economics, it is difficult, unless we
suppose him to have taken leave of his senses, to imagine that he can
himself believe in the medley of nonsense propounded by him. For what
he is here doing--or more probably pretending to do--is to confuse the
cost of producing an edition of a book with the commercial value of that
edition when produced. The labour in question no doubt determines the
price at which the printed paper can be sold at a profit, or without
loss; but the number of copies which the public will be willing to buy,
or, in other words, the value of the edition commercially, depends on
qualities resident in the mind of the author, which render the book
attractive to but few readers, or to many. Whether these qualities
amount to genius in the higher sense of the word, or to nothing more
than a knack of titillating the curiosity of the vulgar, does not affect
the question. In either case--and this is the sole important fact--they
are qualities of the author's mind, and of the author's mind alone; and
the labour of the compositors conduces to the production of a pile of