ialistic agitators is taxed with
maintaining the popular doctrines of socialism with regard to labour, he
at once repudiates them, and accuses his opponents of imputing to him
and his fellows childish fallacies which no one in his senses would
maintain; but the propagation of these fallacies amongst the more
ignorant sections of the population continues just the same.

[7] According to Mr. Hillquit, Dickens, for example, made his whole
fortune by robbing his compositors.

CHAPTER VI

REPUDIATION OF MARX BY MODERN SOCIALISTS, CONTINUED.
THEIR RECOGNITION OF CAPITAL AS THE IMPLEMENT OF DIRECTIVE ABILITY.
THEIR NEW POSITION, AND THEIR NEW THEORETICAL DIFFICULTIES

The reader will remember how, having first elucidated the part which
exceptional mental faculties, concentrated on the direction of labour,
and here called ability, play in modern production, I proceeded to
the question of the means by which this direction is accomplished,
and showed that these were supplied by the possession of
wage-capital--capitalism thus representing no mere passive monopoly, but
a system of reins which are attached to innumerable horses, and are
useless except as vehicles of the skill with which the coachmen handle
them. We shall find that by implication, if not always by direct
admission, the intellectual socialists of to-day are in virtual but
unacknowledged agreement with this further portion of the present
argument also.

In order to demonstrate that such is the case, let me briefly call
attention to a point on which we shall have to dwell at much greater
length presently--namely, that these socialists, though they reject the
theory of production on which morally and intellectually the earlier
socialism based itself, persist in making promises to the labourers
precisely of the same kind as those with which the earlier socialism
first whetted their appetites. In especial besides promising them
indefinitely augmented wealth, they continue to promise them also some
sort of _economic emancipation_; and many of these socialists, in
explicit accord with their predecessors, declare that what they mean by
emancipation is the entire abolition of the wage-system.

Prominent among this number are Mr. Sidney Webb and his colleagues, who
are certainly the best educated group of socialistic thinkers in
England. Mr. Webb, in particular, is a man of conspicuous talent, and
few writers can afford a more favourable illustration than he does o