Contemporary Socialism

other European countries, were still absolutely unknown in England, though England was the country where they were written, and to whose circumstances they were, in their author's judgm

English doctrine, familiar among the disciples of Owen; and to crown all, if the author's belief was true, England was the country ripest for its reception, for the socialist revolution, he thought, would inevitably come when the working class sunk into the condition of a proletariat, and the working class of England had been a proletariat for many years already. Yet Marx's work was not at that time (1884) translated into English, though it

olitical position which compromised him hopelessly with German governments, and forced him, step by step, into a long career of revolutionary agitation and organization. He joined the staff of the Rhenish Gazette, which was founded at that time in Cologne by the leading Liberals of the Rhine country, including Camphausen and Hansemann, and which was the organ of the Young Hegelian, or Philosophical Radical Party, and he made so great an impression by his bold and vigorous criticism of the proceedings of the Rhenish Landtag that he was appointed editor of the newspaper in 1842. In this post he continued his attacks on the Government, and they were at once so effective and so carefully worded that a special censor was sent from Berlin to Cologne to take supervision of his articles, and when this agency proved ineffectual, the journal was suppressed by order of the Prussian Ministry in 1843. From Cologne Marx went to Paris to be a joint editor of the Deutsche Franz?sische Jahrbücher with Arnold Ruge, a leader of the Hegelian Extreme Left, who had been deprived of his professorship at the University of Halle by the Prussian Government, and whose magazine, the Deutsche Jahrbücher, published latterly at Leipzi

their powers, "and from any participation in the fruits of civilization," and maintains that the State had far other duty towards them than to come in contact with them only through the police. When Ruge visited Cabet in Paris, he said that he and his friends (meaning, he explained, the philosophical and political opposition) stood so far aloof from the question of communism that they had never yet so much as raised it, and that, while there were communists in Germany, there was no communistic party. This statement is probably equivalent to saying that he and his school took as yet a purely theoretical and Platonic interest in socialism, and had not come to adopt it as part of their practical programme. Most of them were already communists by conviction, and the others felt their general philosophical and political principles forcing them towards communism, and the reason of their hesitation in accepting it is probably expressed by Ruge, when he says (in an article in Heinzen's "Die Opposition," p. 103), that the element of truth in communism was its sense of the necessity of political emancipation, but that there was a great danger of communists forgetting the political question in their zeal for the social. It was chiefly under the influence of the Humanism into which Feuerbach had transformed the Idealism of Hegel, that the Hegelian Left passed into communism. Humanist and communist became nearly convertible term

ed, as Lange points out, through Comte's three epochs. Theology was swept away, and then metaphysics, and in its room came a positive and materialistic anthropology which declared that the senses were the sole sources of real knowledge, that the body was not only part of man's being, but its totality and essence, and, in short, that man is what he eats-Der Mensch ist was er isst. Man, therefore, had no other God before man, and the promotion of man's happiness and culture in this earthly life-which was his only life-was the sole natural object of his political or religious interest. This system was popularized by Feuerbach's brother Friedrich, in a little work called the "Religion of the Future," which enjoyed a high authority

the same fate. The dissolution of theology into anthropology in the field of thought is the dissolution of monarchy into republic in the field of politics. Dualism, separation is the essence of theology; dualism, separation is the essence of monarchy. There we have the antithesis of God and world; here we have the antithesis of State and people." This dualism must be abolished. The State must be humanized-must be made an instrument in the hands of all for the welfare of all; and its inhabitants must be politized, for they, all of them, constitute the pol

rceive the natural tendency of the teaching that the social man was the true human unit and essence, and was to the individual as a God. With most of his disciples Humanism meant making the individual disappear in the community, making egoism disappear in love, and making private property disappear in collective. Hess flatly declared that "the species was the end, and the individuals were only means." Ruge disputed this doctrine, and contended that the empirical individual was the true human unit and the true end; but even he said that socialism was the humanism of common life. Grün passes into socialism by simply applying to property Feuerbach's method of dealing with theology and monarchy. He argues that if the true essence of man is the social man, then, just as theology is anthropology, so is anthropology socialism, for property is at present entirely alienated, externalized from the social man. There is a false transcendency in it, like that of divinity and monarchy. "Deal, therefore," he sa

expressed very plainly by W. Marr, himself an active humanist, who carried Feuerbach's "Essence of Christianity" as his constant companion, and founded a secret society for promoting humanistic views. In his interesting book on Secret Societies in Switzerland, he says, "The masses can only be gathered under the flag of negation. When you present detailed plans, you excite controversies and sow divisions; you repeat the mistake of the French socialists, who have scattered their redoubtable forces because they tried to carry formulated systems. We are content to lay down the foundation of the revolution. We shall have deserved well of it if we stir hatred and contempt against all existing institutions. We make war against all prevailing ideas, of religion, of the State, of country, of patriotism. The idea of God is the keystone of a perverted civilization. It must be destroyed. The true root of liberty, of equality, of culture, is Atheism. Nothing must restrain the spontaneity of the human mind." All this work of annihilation could neither be done by reform, nor by conspiracy, but only by revolution, and "a revolution is never made; it makes itself." While the revolution was making, Marr founded an association in Switzerland, "Young Germany," which should prepare society for taking effective action when the hour came. There was a "Young Germany" in Switzerland when he arrived there; part of a federation of secret societies establ

he excited at the time is certainly not justified by any of the writings he has left us. He was a tailor from Magdeburg, who was above his work, believing himself to be a poet and a man of letters, condemned by hard fate and iniquitous social arrangements to a dull and cruel lot. Having gone to Paris when socialism was the rage there, he eagerly embraced that new gospel, and went to Switzerland to carry its message of hope to his own German countrymen. There he forsook the needle altogether, and lived as the paid apostle of the dignity of manual labour, for which he had himself little mind. His ideas are crude, confused, and arbitrary. His ideal of society was a community of labourers, with no State, no Church, no individual property, no distinction of rank or position, no nationality, no fatherland. All were to have equal rights and duties, and each was to be put in a position to develop his capacity and gratify his bents as far as possible. He was moved more by the desire for abstract equality than German socialists of the humanist or contemporary type, for they do not build on the justice of a more equal distribution of wealth so much as on the necessity of the possession of property for the free development of the human personality. He is entirely German, however, in his idea of the government of the new society. It was to be governed by the three greatest philosophers of the age, assisted by a board of trade, a board of health, and a board of education. In Switzerland he founded, to promote his views, a secret society, the "Alliance of the Just," which had branches in most of the Swiss towns. Its members w

ll be the only one known to history that is not utopian. Other revolutions have been partial, wrought by a class in the interests of a class; but this one will be a universal and uniform revolution, effected in the name of all society, for the proletariat is a class which possesses a universal character because it dissolves all other separate classes into itself. It is the only class that takes its stand on a human and not a historical title. Its very sorrows and grievances have nothing special or relative in them; they are the broad sorrows and grievances of humanity. And its claims are like them; for it asks no special privileges or special prerogatives; it asks nothing but what all the world will share along with it. The history of the world is the judgment of the world, and the duration of an order of things founded on the ascendancy of a limited class possessing money and culture, is practically condemned and foredoomed by the rapid multiplication of a large class outside which possess neither. The growth of this latter body not merely tends to produce, but actually is, the dissolution of the existing system of things. For the existing system is founded on the ass

ection towards which the stream of things was itself slowly but mightily moving. Hegel sought the principle of organic development in the State, but Marx sought it rather in civil society, and believed he had discovered it in that most mighty though unconscious product of the large system of industry, the modern proletariat, which was born to revolution as the sparks fly upward; and in the simultaneous decline of the middle classes, that is, of the conservative element which could resist the

d a paper called Vorw?rts, and in this and other journals open to him, he attacked the Prussian administration so strongly that that administration complained to Guizot, who gave him orders to quit France. His more personal controversy at this time arose out of one of the schisms of the Young Hegelians, and he and his friend Friedrich Engels wrote a pamphlet-"Die Heilige Familie"-against the Hegelian Idealism, and especially against Bruno Bauer, who had offended him-says Erdmann, in his "Histor

that of a scientific insight into the economic structure of society, and that this ought to be put into a popular form, not with the view of carrying out any utopian system, but of promoting among the working classes and other classes a self-conscious participation in the process of historical transformation of society that was taking place under their eyes." This is always with Marx the distinctive and ruling feature of his system. The French schemes were impracticable utopias, because they ignored the laws of history and the real structure of economic society; and he claims that his own proposals are not only practicable but inevitable, because they strictly observe the line of the actual industrial evolution, and are thus, at worst, plans for accelerating the day after to-morrow. But, besides this difference of principle, Marx thought the League should also change its method and tactics. Its work, being that of social revolution, was different from the work of the old political conspirators and secret societies, and therefore needed different weapons; the times, too, were changed, and offered new instruments. Street insurrections, surprises, intrigues, pronunciamentos might overturn a dynasty, or oust a government, or bring them to reason, but were of no avail in the world for introducing collective property or abolishing wage labour. People would just begin again the day

no more; and society was drawn up in two widely separated hostile camps, the large capitalist class or bourgeoisie, who had all the property and power in the country, and the labouring class, the proletariat, who had nothing of either. The bourgeoisie had played a most revolutionary part in history. They had overturned feudalism, and now they had created proletarianism, which would soon swamp themselves. They had collected the masses in great towns; they had kept the course of industry in perpetual flux and insecurity by rapid successive transformations of the instruments and processes of production, and by continual recurrences of commercial crises; and while they had reduced all other classes to a proletariat, they had made the life of the proletariat one of privation, of uncertainty, of discontent, of incipient revolution. They exploited the labourer of political power; they exp

or one-tenth. Communism did not seek to abolish marriage and the family, but only the bourgeois system of things under which marriage and the family, in any true sense of those terms, were virtually class institutions, for the proletariat could not have any family life worthy of the name, so long as their wages were so low that they were forced to huddle up their whole family regardless of all decency, in a single room, so long as their wives and daugh

application of rent to State expenditure; (2) abolition of inheritance; (3) confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels; (4) centralization of credit in the hands of the State by means of a national bank, with State capital and exclusive monopoly; (5) centralization of all means of transport in hands of State; (6) institution of national factories, and improvement of lands on a common plan; (7) compulsory obligation of labour upon all equally, and establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture; (8) joint prosecution of agriculture and mechan

he Rhenish revolutionary movement, the most important one of the year in Germany, and that in which, as we have seen, the young Lassalle first emerged on the troubled surface of revolutionary politics. After the coup d'état of November, dissolving the Prussian Parliament, the New Rhenish Gazette strongly urged the people to stop paying their taxes, and thus meet force by force. It inserted an admonition to that effect in a prominent place in every successive number, and Marx was twice tried

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succeeded by a great flood-wave of revolution which they heard already sounding along in their dangerously expectant ear. His poem on the Revolution remains as evidence to us that in 1850 he still clung to that hope, an

ctrine, but of opportunity; the extremer members thought the conflict in Germany on the Hessian question offered a good chance for a fresh revolutionary outbreak, and they left the League because their views were not adopted. The other is that in one of its last reports (quoted by Mehring) the League definitely justifies, and even recommends, assassination and incendiarism-"the so-called excesses, the inflictions of popular vengeance on hated individuals, or on public buildings which revive hateful associations." For the next ten years Marx lived quietly in London, writing for the New York Tribune and other journals, and studying modern industry on this its "classical soil." He read much in the British Museum Library, gaining his remarkable acquaintance with the English economic writers, and it was probably in this period he elaborated his famous doctrine of surplus value, with its corollary of the right of the labourer to the full product of his labour. There can be no doubt that the original suggestion of this doctrine came from English sources, for it was ta

were present, a committee was appointed to follow up the suggestion, this committee asked Marx to prepare a programme and statutes for the proposed association, and he impressed upon it at its birth the stamp of his own revolutionary socialism. He never had a higher official position in the International than corresponding secretary for Germany, for it was determined, probably with the view of securing a better hold of the great English working class and their extensive trade organizations, that the president and secretary should be English working men, and then, after a time, the office of president was abolished altogether because it had a monarchical savour. But Marx had the ablest, the best informed, and probably the most made-up mind in the council; he governed without reigning; and, with his faithful German following, he exercised an almost paramount influence on its action from first to last, in spite of occasional revolts and intrigues against an authority which democratic jealousy resented as dictatorial, or-worse still-monarchical. The statutes of the association, which were adopted at the Geneva Congress of 1866, declared that "the economic subjection of the labourer to the possessor of the means of labour, i.e. of the sources of life, is the first cause of his political, moral, and material servitude, and that the economic emancipation of labour is consequently the great aim to which every political movement ought to be subordinated." Now no doubt the "economic emancipation of labour" meant different things to different sections of the Association's members. To the English trades unionists it meant practically better wages; to the Russian nihilists it meant the downfall of the Czar and of all central political authority, and leaving the socialistic communal organization of their country to manage itself without interference from above; to some of the French members (as appeared at the Lausanne Congress in 1867) it meant the nationalizatio

continue, the country would be rapidly ripe for revolution. While the old order of things was thus hastening to its doom, the new order of things had made some advances. The Ten Hours Act was "not merely a great practical result, but was the victory of a principle. For the first time the political economy of the bourgeoisie had been in clear broad day put in subjection to the political economy of the working class." Then, again, the experiment of co-operation had now been sufficiently tried to show that it was possible to carry on industry without the intervention

entralist Democratic Socialists, headed by Marx, and the Anarchist Socialists, headed by Michael Bakunin, the Russian revolutionist. The Marxists insisted that the socialist régime of collective property and systematic co-operative production could not possibly be introduced, maintained, or regulated, except by means of an omnipotent and centralized political authority-call it the State, call it the collectivity, call it what you like-which should have the final disposal of everything. The Bakunists held that this was just bringing back the old tyranny and slavery in a more excessive and intolerable form. They took up the tradition of Proudhon, who said that "the true form of the State is anarchy," meaning by anarchy, of course, not positive disorder, but the absence of any supreme ruler, whether king or convention. They would have property possessed and industry pursued on a communistic principle by groups or associations of workmen, but these groups must form themselves freely and voluntarily, without any social or political compulsion. The Marxists declared that this was simply a retention of the system of free competition in an aggravated form, that it would only lead to confusion worse confounded, and that the Bakunists, even in trying to abolish the evils of laissez-faire, were still foolishly supposing that the world could go of itself. This division of opinion-really a broader one than that which parts socialist from orthodox economist-rent the already enfeebled International into two separate organizations, which languished for a year or two and passed away. And so, with high thoughts of spreading a reign of fraternity over the earth, the International Working Men's Association perished, because, being only human, it could not maintain fraternity in its own narrow borders. This is a history that repeats itself again and again in socialist movements. As W. Marr said in the remark quoted above, revolutionists will only unite on a negation; the moment they begin to ask what they will put in its place they differ and dispute and come to nought. Apprehend them, close their meetings, banish their leaders, and you but knit them by common suffering to common resistance. You supply them with a negation of engrossing interest, you preoccupy their minds with a negative programme which keeps them united, an

occupied his time in completing his work Das Capital, under frequent interruption from i

able, learned, and important work, founded on diligent research, evincing careful elaboration of materials, much acuteness of logical analysis, and so much solicitude for precision that a special terminology has been invented to secure it. The author's taste for logical distinctions, however, as he has actually applied it, serves rather to darken than to elucidate his exposition. He overloads with analysis secondary

ision of functions has taken place. It is, he says, not a logical but a historical category. In former times men all wrought for the supply of their own wants, the seed and stock they received was saved and owned by themselves, capital was an instrument in the hands of labour. But in modern times, especially since the rise of foreign commerce in the 16th century, this situation has been gradually reversed. Industry is now conducted by speculators, who advance the stock and pay the labourer's wages, in order to make gain out of the excess of the product over the advances, and labour is a mere instrument in the hands of capital. The capitalist is one who, without being personally a producer, advances money to producers to provide them with materials and tools, in the hope of getting a larger sum of money in return, and capital is the money so advanced. With this representation of capital as money, so long as it is but a popular

or other people's wants, made for sale in the market, made for its own increase. What Marx wants to discover is how all this independent wealth has come to accumulate in hands that do not produce it, and in particular from whence comes the increase expected from its use, because it is this increase that enables it to accumulate. What he endeavours to show is that this increase of value cannot take place anywhere

at they gained to-day as sellers, and the old level of value would be restored. No increase whatever would be effected. There is indeed a class of people whom he describes as always buying and never selling-the unproducing class who live on their money, and who, he says, receive by legal titles or by force wealth made by producers without giving anything in exchange for it. And it may be supposed that perhaps value is created by selling things to this class of persons, or by selling things to them above their true value, but that is not so; you would have brought no new value into the world by such a transaction, and even if you got more for your goods than

by it do not produce. Here, then, is a riddle, and Marx sets himself to rede it. True, he says, value is not created directly in the market, but a commodity is purchased in the market which has the remarkable property of creating value. That commodity is the human powers of labour. The very use of these powers, their consumption, their expenditure, is the creation of value. But marvellous as they are, their possessor is obliged to sell them, because while they are yielding their product he must meanwhile live, and he sells a day's use of them for a day's means of living. Th

pplication of the first; that the natural wages of labour are determined by the cost of its production, and that the cost of the production of labour is the cost of the labourer's subsistence. The fault he finds with the present system is accordingly this, that while labour creates all value it is paid only by its stated living, no matter how much value it creates; and he then goes over the phenomena of modern industrial life to show h

the value of the product, and preserved in it, and even that could not be done except by labour. The old value is preserved by labour, and all new value is conferred by it, and therefore interest is a consideration entirely out of the question. It is obvious to object that labour by itself is as unproductive as capital by itself, but Marx would rep

ue in use and none in exchange, and diamonds had great value in exchange and little in use. Value in use is therefore not value strictly so called, it is utility; but strictly speaking value in exchange, according to Marx, is not value either, but only the form under which in our state of society value manifests itself. There was no exchange in primitive society when every family produced things to supply its own wants, and there would be no exchange in a communism, for in an exchange the transacting parties stand to one another equa

gratification is equivalent to so much satisfaction of hunger. The loaf and the fiddle may be compared in value, but not by means of their several uses. Third, there are many commodities which are useful and yet have no value in exchange: air, for example, water, and, he adds, virgin soil. In seeking what in the exchange the value depends on, we must therefore leave the utility of the commodities exchanged entirely out of account; and if we do so, there is only one other attribute they all possess in common, and it must be on that attribute that their value rests. That attribute is that they are all products of labour. While we looked to the utility of c

of the exertion. Quantity of labour is thus reduced to time of labour, and is measured by hours and days and weeks. Marx accordingly defines value to be an immanent relation of a commodity to time of labour, and the secret of ex

ency, using the means which the age affords-in short, what he calls the socially necessary time of labour. Value is an immanent relation to socially necessary time of labour. Marx's standard is thus, after all, not one of quantity of labour pure and simple; it takes into account, besides, the average productive power of labour in different branches of industry. "The value of a commodity," says he, "changes directly as the quantity, and inversely as the productive power, of the labour which realizes itself in that commodity." Before we know the value of a commodity we must therefore know not only the quantity of labour that has gone into it, but the productive power of that labour. We gather the quantity from the duration of exertion, but how is average productive power to be ascertained? By si

rx understands value. But then, he says, they command a price. Virgin soil is actually sold in the market; it may procure things that have value though it has none itself. Now, this distinction between value and price has no bearing on the matter at all, for the simple reason that, as Marx himself admits, price is only a particular form of value. Price, he says, is "the money form of value"; it is value expressed in money; it is the exchange value of a commodity for money. To say that uncultivated land may have a price but not a value is, on Marx's own showing, to say that it has an exchange value which can be definitely measured in money, and has yet no value. But he has started from the phenomena of exchange; he has told us that exchange value is the only form in which we experience value now; and he thus arrives at a theory of

duce a ware, i.e., a thing which has not merely value in use, but value in exchange, he must produce something which is not only useful to himself, but useful to others," i.e., socially useful. A product of labour which is useless to the producer and everybody else has no value of any sort; a product of labour which, while useful to the producer, is useless to any one else, has no exchange value. It satisfies no want of others. This would seem to cover the case of over-production, when commodities lose their value for a time because nobody wants them. Lassalle explained this depreciation of value by saying that the time of labour socially necessary to produce the articles in qu

? Value is constituted in every object by its possession of two characteristics: 1st, that it is socially useful; 2nd, that it costs some labour or trouble to procure it. No commodity lacks value which possesses both of these characteristics; and no commodity has value which lacks either of them. Now there are two kinds of commodities. Some may be produced to an indefinite amount by means of labour, and since all who desire them can obtain them at any time for the labour they cost, their social desirableness, their social utility, has no influence on their value, which, therefore, always stands in the ratio of their cost of production alone. Other classes of commodities cannot be in this way indefinitely multiplied by labour; their quantity is strictly limited by natural or other causes; those who desire them cannot get them for the mere labour of producing them; and the value of commodities of this sort will consequently always stand in excess of their relative cost of production, and will be really deter

, country, and customs. The part of the labouring day required to produce this definite quantity of provisions and comforts for the use of the day may be called the necessary time of labour-the time during which the workman produces what is necessary for keeping him in existence-and the value created in this season may be called necessary value. But the workman's physical powers may hold on labouring longer than this, and the rest of his working day may accordingly be called surplus time of labour, and the value created in it surplus value. This surplus value may be created or increased in two ways: either by reducing or cheapening the labourer's subsistence, i.e., by shortening the term of necessary labour; or by prolonging the length of the working day, i.e., by increasing the term of surplus labour. There are limits indeed within which this kind of action must stop. The quantity of means of life cannot be reduced below the minimum that is physically indispensable to sustain the labourer for the day, and the term of labour cannot be stretched beyond the labourer's capacity of physical endurance. But within these limits may be played an important r?le, and the secret of surplus value lies in the simple plan of giving the labourer as little as he is able to live on, and working him as long as he is able to stand. A labourer works 12 hours a day because he cannot work longer and work permanently and well, and he gets three shillings a day of wages, because three sh

ecessary labour, which is chiefly done by inventions that cheapen the necessaries of life. The consideration of the first of these points leads Marx into a discussion of the normal length of the day

ree required by society at the time. Between the maximum and minimum limit there is, however, considerable play-room, and therefore we find labouring days prevailing of very different length, 8 hours, 10, 12, 14, 16, and even 18 hours. There is no principle in the existing industrial economy which fixes the length of the day; it must be fixed by law on a sound view of the requirements of the case. Marx pitches upon 8 hours as the best limit, because it affords a security for the permanent physical efficiency of the labourer, and gives him leisure for satisfying those intellectual and social wants which are becoming every day more largely imperative. He makes no use of the reason often urged for the 8 hours day, that the increased intelligence it would tend to cultivate in the working class would in many ways conduce to such an increase of production as would justify the shorter term of work. But he is very strong for the necessity of having it fixed by law, and points out that even then employers will need to be carefully watched or they will find ways and means of extending the day in spite of the law. When the day was fixed in England at

rer." They not only increase social wealth at his expense, but in many cases they do him positive injury. These improvements have cost capitalists nothing, though capitalists derive the whole advantage from them. Subdivision, combination, organization, are simply natural resources of social labour, and natural resources of any kind are not produced by the capitalist. Inventions, again, are the work of science, and science costs the capitalist nothing. Labour, association, science-these are the sources of the increase; capital is nowhere, yet it sits and seizes the whole. Machinery, of course, is capital, but then Marx will not admit that it creates any value, and contends that it merely transfers to

ges which affords great opportunity for exploiting the labourer. Muscular power is more easily dispensed with than formerly, and so the cheaper labour of women and children is largely superseding the dearer labour of men. If this goes on much further, the manufacturer will get the labour of a whole family for the wages he used to pay to its head alone, and the labourer will be converte

e increasing extent of fixed capital which cannot otherwise be made to pay. But this is a mistake on their part, says Marx. For, according to the factory inspector's reports, shortening the day of labour to 10 hours has increased production and not diminished it, and the explanation is that the men can work harder while they are at it, if the duration of their labour is shortened. Shortening the day of labour has not only inc

ay's wages, for he can be much more easily and extensively exploited by the piece system. He contends that experience has proved this in trades like the compositors and ship carpenters, in which both systems of payment are in operation side by side, and he cites from the factory inspectors' reports of 1860 the case of a factory employing 400 hands, 200 paid by the piece and 200 by the day. The piece hands had an interest in working overtime, and the day hands were obliged to follow suit without receiving a farthing extra for the additional hour or half-hour. This might be stopped by further legislation, but then Marx holds that the system of piece payment is so prone to abuse that when one door of exploitation shuts another only opens, and legislation will always remain ineffectual. Every peculiarity of the system furnishes opportunity either for reducing wages or increasing work. On the piece system the worth of labour is determined by the worth of the work it does, and unless the work possess average excellence the stipulated price is withheld. There is thus always a specious pretext ready to the employer's hand for making deductions from wages on the ground that the work done did not come up to the stipulated standard. Then again, it furnishes the employer with a definite m

transgress the legal or normal limits of the day of labour, and to raise or exceed the normal degree of the intensity of labour. Marx, quoting from Dunning, says that it was customary in the engineering trade in London for employers to engage a foreman of exceptional physical powers, and pay him an extra salary per quarter to keep the men up to his own pace; an expedient which, he adds, is actually recommended to farmers by Morton in his "Agricultural Encyclop?dia." He attributes to piecework, especially in its operation on women and child

present extent. Even in England, where the technical means of saving labour are enormous, this could not be done except by converting most of our present "unproductive" labourers into productive. There is therefore, Marx conceives, no reason why any one should be out of work; but at present, what with the introduction of new machinery, the industrial cycles, the commercial crises, the changes of fashion, the transitions of every kind, we have always, besides the industrial army in actual service, a vast industrial reserve who are either entirely out of employment or very inadequately employed. This relative over-population is an inevitable consequence of the capitalistic management of industry, which first compels one-half of the labouring community to do the work of all, and then makes use of the redundancy of labour so created to compel the working half to take less pay. Low wages spring from the excessive competition among labourers caused by this relative over-population. "Rises and falls in the rate of wages are universally regulated by extensions and contractions in the industrial reserve

narrow craft. Another current cause of over-population is that under the stress of modern labour the workman is old before his years, and while still in middle life becomes unfit for full work, and passes into the reserve. Marx says this is the real reason for the prevalence of early marriages among the working class. They are generally condemned for being improvident, but they are really resorted to from considerations of providence, for working men foresee that they will be prematurely disabled for work, and desire, when that day comes, to have grown-up children about them who shall be able to support them. Other current causes are new inventions and new fashions, which always throw numbers out of work. Latent over-population is wha