nged in parallel lines--for Mr. Hillquit's argument
means neither more nor less than this--is, let me repeat, incredible.
What, then, is the explanation of his indulging in a performance of this
degrading kind? The explanation is that he, like so many of his
colleagues, though recognising personally that labour among "modern
nations" depends for its higher productivity on the picked men who
direct it, cannot bring himself to renounce, when he is making his
appeal to the masses, the old doctrine that they are the sole producers;
and accordingly having started with the ostentatious admission that
directive ability is as essential to production as labour is, he
endeavours by his verbal jugglery with the case of a printed book to
convey the impression that labour produces all values after all; and he
actually manages to wind up with a repetition of the old Marxian moral
that the profits of ability mean nothing but labour which has not been
paid for.[7]

One of my reasons, then, for beginning the present examination of
socialism with exposing the fallacy of principles which the intellectual
socialists of to-day are so eager to proclaim that they have long since
abandoned, is the fact that these principles are still the principles of
the multitude; that for practical purposes they are those which most
urgently require refutation; and that the intellectual socialists who
have doubtless repudiated them personally, not only do not attempt to
discredit them in the eyes of the ignorant, but themselves continue to
appeal to them as instruments of popular agitation.

My other reason for following the course in question is that the theory
of socialism in its higher and more recent forms, which recognises
directive intellect in addition to manual effort as one of the forces
essential to the production of modern wealth, cannot be understood and
estimated in any profitable way, without a previous examination of those
earlier doctrines and ideas, some of which it still retains, while it
modifies and rejects others.

And now let us take up again the thread of our main argument. We laid
this down early in the present chapter, having emphasised the fact that,
the intellectual socialists of to-day agree, on their own admission,
with one proposition at all events which has been elucidated in this
volume--namely, that labour alone, as one of their spokesmen puts it,
"is impotent to produce the wealth of modern nations," the faculties and
th