listic production as a world process, passing by
necessity through certain stages of social development, and unless
some change of law and spirit came to modify it, moving towards an
inevitable destiny. His followers are too apt to regard that as an
absolutely inevitable destiny, but the fault lies not at his door. He
saw it as Socialism. It did not appear to him as it does to many that
there is a possible alternative to Socialism, that the process may
give us, not a triumph for the revolting proletariat, but their
defeat, and the establishment of a plutocratic aristocracy culminating
in imperialism and ending in social disintegration. From his study,
from the studious rotunda of the British Museum Reading-room he made
his prophecy of the growing class consciousness of the workers, of the
inevitable class war, of the revolution and the millennium that was to
follow it. He gathered his facts, elaborated his deductions and waited
for the dawn.

So far as his broad generalization of economic development goes,
events have wonderfully confirmed Marx. The development of Trusts, the
concentration of property that America in particular displays, he
foretold. Given that men keep to the unmodified ideas of private
property and individualism, and it seems absolutely true that so the
world must go. And in the American _Appeal to Reason_, for example,
which goes out weekly from Kansas to a quarter of a million of
subscribers, one may, if one chooses, see the developing class
consciousness of the workers, and the promise--and when strikers take
to rifles and explosives as they do in Pennsylvania and Colorado,
something more than the promise--of the class war....

But the modern Socialist considers that this generalization is a
little too confident and comprehensive; he perceives that a change in
custom, law or public opinion may delay, arrest or invert the economic
process, and that Socialism may arrive after all not by a social
convulsion, but by the gradual and detailed concession of its
propositions. The Marxist presents dramatically what after all may
come methodically and unromantically, a revolution as orderly and
quiet as the precession of the equinoxes. There may be a concentration
of capital and a relative impoverishment of the general working mass
of people, for example, and yet a general advance in the world's
prosperity and a growing sense of social duty in the owners of capital
and land may do much to mask this antagon