th which by means of wage-capital
this labour is directed.

The two addresses in which these points were elaborated had no sooner
been delivered than, from all parts of the country, through newspapers
and private letters, and sometimes by word of mouth, socialists of
various types addressed themselves to the business of replying to me.
These replies, whatever may have been their differences otherwise, all
took the form of a declaration that I was only wasting my time in
exposing the doctrine that labour is the sole producer of wealth, and in
laying such stress on the part played by directive ability; for no
serious socialist of the present day any longer believed the one, or
failed to recognise the other. Thus one of my critics told me that what
I ought to do was "to discuss the principles of socialism as understood
and accepted by the intelligent disciples, and not the worn-out and
discredited theories of Marx." Another was good enough to tell me that I
had "cleverly accomplished the task of exposing the errors of Marx, both
of premise and of logic"; but the leaders of socialistic thought "in its
later developments" had, he proceeded to say, long ago outgrown these. A
third wrote me a letter bristling with all kinds of challenges, and
asked me if I thought, for example, that socialists were such fools as
not to recognise that the talents of an inventor like Mr. Edison
increased the productivity of labour by the new direction which they
gave to it. I might multiply similar quotations, but one more will be
enough here. It is taken from a long article directed against myself by
Mr. Hillquit--a writer to whom my special attention was called as by far
the most accomplished exponent, among the militant socialists of
America, of socialism in its most logical and most highly developed
form. "It requires," said Mr. Hillquit, "no special genius to
demonstrate that all labour is not alike, nor equally productive. It is
still more obvious that common manual labour is impotent to produce the
wealth of modern nations--that organisation, direction, and control are
essential to productive work in the field of modern production, and are
just as much a factor in it as mere physical effort."[3]

But we need not confine ourselves to my own late critics in America. The
general history of socialism as a reasoned theory is practically the
same in one country as in another. The intellectual socialists in
England, among whom Mr. Bernard Shaw