competition now existing, while Humanism, or Marxism, tends to a uniform
condition of humanity which the American proletariat would fight tooth
and nail because they would rightly believe that for them it would at
present be a leveling down instead of leveling up.

Karl Marx was, of course, not the inventor of Socialism, nor was he, so
far as I know, the originator of any of its fundamental doctrines, - the
doctrine, for example, that all value is derived from Labor was part of
mediaeval clericism, - but be first reduced it to coherent form and
published it as a complete and definite system, and upon the issues,
substantially as he formulated and left them, must Socialism stand or
fall.

I must assume the members of the Ruskin Club to be familiar with the
Marxian fundamental propositions, which I do not state because I shall
confine my attack to the three derived propositions about which
discussion mainly centers. We certainly do not want an exercise in
serious dialectics after dinner, but I will say in passing that I do not
think that any of his fundamental propositions are true, or that his
theory of value has a single sound leg to stand on, and as for what he
calls "surplus value," I doubt whether there be such a thing. At any
rate he has not proved it, nor can it be proved, without taking into
consideration the enormous number of industrial failures, as well as the
more limited number of industrial successes - and there are no data for
that purpose. I may also mention as what seems to me a fatal flaw in
Socialistic philosophy, its concentration upon the conditions of
Industrial Society, without adequate conception of a provision for the
requirements of agriculture. Industrialism and commercialism are
doubtless conveniences essential to our present civilization; but if
every factory and all commerce were blotted from the earth the world