For it is the units of product in a given time which alone the capitalist who is entering on any industrial enterprise has to consider in framing his estimates; and it is precisely what the labourers would themselves have to consider if they abolished the capitalists to-morrow, and owned and worked the land, machinery, railways, and other instruments of production themselves; - as they would soon discover when they entered into competition with other nations for the world's trade, however much they might be content at home to share the product between themselves according to the mere time of labour spent on it. For observe, if the same product could be turned out by a newly invented machine in half the time that they would take to make it, by what human device could they sell their product in the open market unless they consented to sell it at half its former price! And what would this mean but that they would have now to accept half the wages for their labour-time that they were getting before! They would have been 'exploited,' in a word, by the new machine which the inventor had sold to a rival nation, as neatly and effectively as if it had been the hated capitalists themselves who had done it.

And if they still insisted on having their pound of flesh whatever should befall, and proceeded next to put the thumb-screw on the inventor of the machine to force him to give it over to them instead of to their rivals, on the usual terms of the 'labour-time ' he had spent on it, and no more, they would now be exploiting the inventor in turn as much as ever the capitalists had exploited them. But if the inventor, defrauded of his due. should strike work and refuse to invent, and they should then proceed, like King John, to metaphorically ' draw his teeth ' for him one by one until he consented to present them with the contents of his brain, how would their tyranny differ from that of the capitalist-masters under whom they now groan and against whom they cry to Heaven for justice? But let me not be misunderstood. For did they now turn round and give back to the inventors and brain-workers, in honour, authority, prestige, and esteem, what they had expropriated from them in wealth, they would, in my judgment, have struck on a constitution of economic society as nearly perfect as on this side of the millennium we are ever likely to see. They would then have given their really 'great men' in Carlyle's sense of the term, the place of honour and initiative.

But would they do this? Not they; on the contrary they would give the chief seats at their feasts to the ' wind-bags ' and coiners of phrases, the platitudinarians, and be-puffed mediocrities, - especially if they were good 'sportsmen,' footballers, cricketers, or what not, as well, - and that, too, in the really sincere belief that these were their 'great men.' For in themselves the miscellaneous masses of men in any nation are nothing, a tail of ciphers merely; they can imagine nothing, invent nothing, do nothing great, however much they may beat their brains for it; - this is the prerogative of individuals alone, who are born in every rank, and can come only by what the theologians call 'the Grace of God.' Were you to pack all the ordinary chessplayers of the world into the Albert Hall, not all their combined heads put together, with their vote taken on each move before it was made, could get even within sight of a 'draw' from one of the great masters of the game. And it is the same with the game of War, of Poetry, of Music, of Art, of Mathematics, of Philosophy, of Religion, or of intellectual penetration generally in any department of thought or life; or even, if you will, down to billiard-players, cricketers, and the really great 'sportsmen' in every line.

The great players are always individuals, always uniques, with unbridgeable gulfs between them and the rest of the world; they are the only dynamical forces of the world: the rest are but mere statical accompaniments and chorus, mere ballast to keep the ship steady, mere critics, like those who surround a cricket or football field, with just ability enough to decide on the merits of the great players, but not able to play themselves, and whose function it is either to hiss or applaud. So that if in this game of Industry any nation were so rash as to turn out the men who discover, invent, organize, and legislate for its future, or to rob them of their just reward, and to put a miscellaneous herd of navvies, coal-heavers, and ordinary workmen in their place, it would speedily find itself over-run, routed, and reduced to a tributary and dependent position by the first great nation that came along, which, like Japan, gave to its great men a free hand. And this brings us at once to the crux of the Marxian Socialism both as to its truth and its falsity.

Its falsity consists in its not seeing that while the workmen are exploited directly by the capitalists who own the pistols and pull the triggers, they are really made to stand and deliver by the pistols, - that is to say by the machinery, - which can do the work of thousands of men in a given unit of time: and that this is the work of the great scientists, inventors, and organizers, and not of the capitalists or of the workmen themselves; and that if you are going to raise the question of justice, according to the ordinarily accepted standards, it is to these that the 'surplus product' belongs. The truth in it is simply that they are the 'exploited'; and moreover that they must forever be exploited in greater or less degree by their own incapacity, ignorance, and delusions. Let them lay to heart this golden sentence of Emerson's - 'It is the imbecility of the masses that invites the impudence of power!' High-minded men in every walk of life, yearning to give the working-men every advantage, have gone out of their way, and at the cost of much personal odium have at last succeeded in getting for them the franchise, saying to them - 'Now you can have no longer any cause of complaint; you have the vote; do not, therefore, be afraid to exercise it until your grievances are redressed.' But have they so used it? On the contrary, as Lord Beaconsfield, who had made a special study of the baser admirations of the world foresaw when giving it to them, they actually used it for forty years or more to keep in power, - whom? The very men whom all the time they were railing at as their oppressors! Even in America, where every man is born not only with the franchise, but with every chance of winning in the race of life any position in the Republic which is within the reach of any other man - what has this immense mass of working-men done, or stood by and seen done? They have stood there with the vote in their hands and have seen gigantic Trusts rise under their eyes and become so powerful as not only to strangle all other capitalists, but to well-nigh strangle them also and reduce them to the position of the merest slaves.