our swell the power of the owners. So
it will go on while gain and getting are the rule of your system,
until accumulated tensions between class and class smash this present
social organization and inaugurate a new age."

In considering the thought and work of Karl Marx, the reader must bear
in mind the epoch in which that work commenced. The intellectual world
was then under the sway of an organized mass of ideas known as the
Science of Political Economy, a mass of ideas that has now not so much
been examined and refuted as slipped away imperceptibly from its hold
upon the minds of men. In the beginning, in the hands of Adam
Smith--whose richly suggestive book is now all too little
read--political economy was a broad-minded and sane inquiry into the
statecraft of trade based upon current assumptions of private
ownership and personal motives, but from him it passed to men of
perhaps, in some cases, quite equal intellectual energy but inferior
vision and range. The history of Political Economy is indeed one of
the most striking instances of the mischief wrought by intellectual
minds devoid of vision, in the entire history of human thought.
Special definition, technicality, are the stigmata of second-rate
intellectual men; they cannot work with the universal tool, they
cannot appeal to the general mind. They must abstract and separate. On
such men fell the giant's robe of Adam Smith, and they wore it after
their manner. Their arid atmospheres are intolerant of clouds, an
outline that is not harsh is abominable to them. They criticized their
master's vagueness and must needs mend it. They sought to give
political economy a precision and conviction such a subject will not
stand. They took such words as "_value_," an incurably and necessarily
vague word, "_rent_," the name of the specific relation of landlord
and tenant, and "_capital_," and sought to define them with relentless
exactness and use them with inevitable effect. So doing they departed
more and more from reality. They developed a literature more abundant,
more difficult and less real than all the exercises of the schoolmen
put together. To use common words in uncommon meanings is to sow a
jungle of misunderstanding. It was only to be expected that the bulk
of this economic literature resolves upon analysis into a ponderous,
intricate, often astonishingly able and foolish wrangling about
terminology.

Now in the early Victorian period in which Marx planned his