ism of class interests and
ameliorate its miseries. Moreover, this antagonism itself may in the
end find adequate expression through temperate discussion, and the
class war come disguised beyond recognition, with hates mitigated by
charity and swords beaten into pens, a mere constructive conference
between two classes of fairly well-intentioned albeit perhaps still
biassed men and women.

Sec. 2.

The circle of ideas in which Marx moved was that of a student deeply
tinged with the idealism of the renascent French Revolution. His life
was the life of a recluse from affairs--an invalid's life; a large
part of it was spent round and about the British Museum Reading-room,
and his conceptions of Socialism and the social process have at once
the spacious vistas given by the historical habit and the abstract
quality that comes with a divorce from practical experience of human
government. Only in England and in the eighties did the expanding
propositions of Socialism come under the influence of men essentially
administrative. As a consequence Marx, and still more the early
Marxists, were and are negligent of the necessities of government and
crude in their notions of class action. He saw the economic process
with a perfect lucidity, practically he foretold the consolidation of
the Trusts, and his statement of the necessary development of an
entirely propertyless working-class with an intensifying class
consciousness is a magnificent generalization. He saw clearly up to
that opposition of the many and the few, and then his vision failed
because his experience and interests failed. There was to be a class
war, and numbers schooled to discipline by industrial organization
were to win.

After that the teaching weakens in conviction. The proletariat was to
win in the class war; then classes would be abolished, property in the
means of production and distribution would be abolished, all men would
work reasonably--and the millennium would be with us.

The constructive part of the Marxist programme was too slight. It has
no psychology. Contrasted, indeed, with the splendid destructive
criticisms that preceded it, it seems indeed trivial. It diagnoses a
disease admirably, and then suggests rather an incantation than a
plausible remedy. And as a consequence Marxist Socialism appeals only
very feebly to the man of public affairs or business or social
experience. It does not attract teachers or medical men or engineers.
It arouses