own time.

Rather is it wise to reflect that the present capitalism, with its attendant mercenary militarism and dominant officialism, bears with it the certainty of early destruction; rather is it well to make ready, soberly and scientifically, for the Socialist organisation of production, exchange, and international relations which-however threatening the aspect of affairs at this moment-must inevitably take its place as the future of our race. It is in no spirit of narrow patriotism or petty jealousy of other peoples that I long to see my own country cut out the canker that gnaws away her prosperity, and stand forth before the world as the leader in a reorganisation which will mean enlightenment and happiness for the entire human

race.

APPENDIX.

THE opinions of Rodbertus are almost unknown to English economists, and as his views are of importance to the study of modern socialist economy, I here give an abstract of his opinions translated from Dr Rudolph Meyer's learned work, "Der Emancipations kampf des Vierten Standes." In brief, Rodbertus' view was that, under unrestricted free trade and free contract, present social arrangements for the production and distribution of wealth result in giving to the workers in the shape of wages a smaller and smaller proportional share of the wealth created by improved methods of production. This position he thus maintains:—

1. The wages of labour, Rent, ground-rent, profit on capital are social facts and ideas which only exist because the individuals who are interested in them are united in a single society by the lord of division of labour.

2. Rent is all income which is received without a man's own labour solely on the ground of a possession.

3. Since there can be no income which has not been created beforehand by labour, Rent rests on two absolutely essential preliminary conditions. First, there can be no Rent unless labour produces at least more than is needed for the labourers to continue their labour-for it is impossible for anyone to have an income regularly without working himself, unless such a surplus exists. Secondly, there can be no Rent unless institutions exist which deprive the labourers wholly or in part of this surplus, and hand it over to those who do not labour-for the labourers are naturally always in possession of their product in the first place. That labour should yield such a surplus is due to economical causes which increase the productiveness of labour. That this surplus should wholly or partly be taken from the laboureis and given to others is due to positive law, which, as it is allied with physical force, enforces this abstraction by constant pressure.

"Positive law" is a vile phrase, but it is an exact translation.

"4. Originally slavery, an institution whose development coincided with agriculture and landed property, practised this compulsion.* Labourers who produced such a surplus by their labour became slaves, and the master who owned the labourers as well as their product gave the slaves only just so much of it as was needful for them to carry on their work; the remainder, or the surplus, he took himself. If all the land of a country and all the capital in a country have become private property, landed property and capitalist property exercise similar compulsion on the free labourers. For this will have the same effect as slavery first, inasmuch as the product belongs not to the labourers, but to the owners of the land and capital; and secondly, because the labourers who own nothing as against the masters who own land and capital will be glad to take a part of the produce of their own labour to keep body and soul together, that is to carry on their labour. Thus, instead of the mastery of the slave-owner, the free-contract of the wage-labourer with his employer is introduced; but this contract is only nominally and not really free, and hunger fully makes up for the scourge. What then was called sustenance is now called

wages.

"5. Rent and wages are thus shares into which the product is divided so far as it is income. Whence it follows that the larger one share is the smaller must the other be. If the Rent takes a larger share of the product, a smaller share must remain for wages. As one share varies in size, so must the other in inverse ratio. Since the size of the share of the product rules at the same time the rate of value, the expressions 'high' and 'low' and 'rise' and 'fall,' which are relative ideas, are used in this connection for the permanence and variation of Rent and of wages. We say Rent is high or rises, and wages are low or fall, if the one takes a greater or increasing share of the product, and consequently the other a smaller or diminishing share of it.

"6. Wages, however, are spoken of in another connection than as regards a high or low level, or with respect to a rise or a fall. The degrading conception of a necessary wage has been introduced into the theory of wages—a wage, namely, which contains in itself only just so much as the labourer needs to reproduce his labour force; and thus insensibly the free labourer is regarded from the point of view of a slave, who, in fact, costs just so much susten

Slavery existed in the nomadic state, and this Rodbertus should have recognised.

ance as a machine costs fuel. This amount of necessary wages is used as a scale, and people say that wages are high or rise, or on the contrary are low or fall, according as they approach to or recede from this point to the profit or loss of the labourer. Nevertheless, in this conception of a necessary wage it is not stated that the actual wages of labour cannot fall below this point, or that it must represent an equal quantity of provisions for all periods and all countries.

"7. The position and movement of the wages of labour must be distinguished in both these relations. Wages can in the one connection be high or rise, whilst in the other they may be low or fall, and vice versa. It depends solely on the degree of or the change in the productiveness of labour how far this is possible. If, for instance, the same quantity of labour produces more or increasing wealth, wages may, considered as a share of the product, be low or fall, whilst in relation to the point of necessary requirements they may be high or actually rise.

"8. Division of labour originally took the shape in which the lords of the soil were also masters of the capital. Capital includes raw material, incidental material, and tools; it is product which is used for further production; it is, when reduced to labour, expended labour. So long as the lords of the soil are also masters of the capital, the raw material is necessarily worked up, whether by slaves or free labourers, in the same service of the landowner; the landowner is at the same time a 'manufacturer,' and generally a wholesale dealer in the finished articles into the bargain. In such a case the entire Rent falls to the lot of one combined owner of land and capital, and no distinction is made in general between ground-rent and capital-rent. This arrangement predominated in Greek and Roman antiquity, and is one reason why the rich region of political economy remained undis covered by the ancients; because they never had the conception of capital in its economical meaning, but only as capital in the shape of money (geld-capital).

"9. But division of labour develops itself, because capital has by degrees other masters than the land, and because in this way the raw material which is produced by one set of labourers in the service of the landowner now passes into the possession of the owner of the capital, and is worked up by labourers in his employ; the Rent therefore is divided, and one part falls to the share of the owner of the raw material, namely the landowner,