t
on and led towards new things. But Marx had vision. He had--as Darwin
and the evolutionists had, as most men with a scientific training, and
many educated men without that advantage now have--a sense of secular
change. Instead of being content with the accepted picture of the
world as a scene where men went on producing and distributing wealth
and growing rich or poor, it might be for endless ages, he made an
appeal to history and historical analogies, and for the first time
viewed our age of individualist industrial development, not as a
possibly permanent condition of humanity, but as something unstable
and in motion, as an economic process, that is to say, with a
beginning, a middle, and as he saw it, an almost inevitable end.

The last thing men contrive to discern in every question is the
familiar obvious, and it came as a great and shattering discovery to
the economic and sociological thought of the latter half of the
nineteenth century that there was going on not simply a production but
an immense concentration of wealth, a differentiation of a special
wealthy class of landholder and capitalist, a diminution of small
property owners and the development of a great and growing class of
landless, nearly propertyless men, the _proletariat_. Marx showed--he
showed so clearly that to-day it is recognized by every intelligent
man--that _given a continuance of our industrial and commercial
system_, of uncontrolled gain seeking, that is, given a continuance of
our present spirit and ideas of property, there must necessarily come
a time when the owner and the proletarian will stand face to face,
with nothing--if we except a middle class of educated professionals
dependent on the wealthy, who are after all no more than the upper
stratum of the proletariat--to mask or mitigate their opposition. We
shall have two classes, the class-conscious worker and the
class-conscious owner, and they will be at war. And with a broad
intellectual sweep he flung the light of this conception upon the
whole contemporary history of mankind. _Das Kapital_ was no sketch of
Utopias, had no limitation to the conditions or possibilities of this
country or that. "Here," he says, in the widest way, "is what is going
on all over the world. So long as practically untrammelled private
property, such as you conceive it to-day, endures, this must go on.
The worker gravitates steadily everywhere to a bare subsistence, the
rest of the proceeds of his lab