theorizing, political economy ruled the educated world. Ruskin had
still to attack the primary assumptions of that tyrannous and dogmatic
edifice. The duller sort of educated people talked of the "immutable
laws of political economy" in the blankest ignorance that the basis of
everything in this so-called science was a plastic human convention.
Humane impulses were checked, creative effort tried and condemned by
these mystical formulae. Political economy traded on the splendid
achievements of physics and chemistry and pretended to an inexorable
authority. Only a man of supreme intelligence and power, a man
resolved to give his lifetime to the task, could afford in those days
to combat the pretensions of the political economist; to deny that his
categories presented scientific truth, and to cast that jargon aside.
As for Marx, he saw fit to accept the verbal instruments of his time
(albeit he bent them not a little in use), to accommodate himself to
their spirit and to split and re-classify and re-define them at his
need. So that he has become already difficult to follow, and his more
specialized exponents among Socialists use terms that arouse no echoes
in the contemporary mind. The days when Socialism need present its
theories in terms of a science whose fundamental propositions it
repudiates, are at an end. One hears less and less of "surplus value"
now, as one hears less and less of McCulloch's Law of Wages. It may
crop up in the inquiries of some intelligent mechanic seeking
knowledge among the obsolescent accumulations of a public library, or
it may for a moment be touched upon by some veteran teacher. But the
time when social and economic science had to choose between debatable
and inexpressive technicalities on the one hand or the stigma of
empiricism on the other, is altogether past.

The language a man uses, however, is of far less importance than the
thing he has to say, and it detracts little from the cardinal
importance of Marx that his books will presently demand restatement in
contemporary phraseology, and revision in the light of contemporary
facts. He opened out Socialism. It is easy to quibble about Marx, and
say he didn't see this or that, to produce this eddy in a backwater or
that as a triumphant refutation of his general theory. One may quibble
about the greatness of Marx as one may quibble about the greatness of
Darwin; he remains great and cardinal. He first saw and enabled the
world to see capita