such men to a sense of social instability but it offers no
remedy. They do not believe in the mystical wisdom of the People. They
find no satisfactory promise of a millennium in anything Marx
foretold.

To the labouring man, however, accustomed to take direction and
government as he takes air and sky, these difficulties of the
administrative and constructive mind do not occur. His imagination
raises no questioning in that picture of the proletariat triumphant
after a class war and quietly coming to its own. It does not occur to
him for an instant to ask "how?"

Question the common Marxist upon these difficulties and he will
relapse magnificently into the doctrine of _laissez faire_. "That will
be all right," he will tell you.

"How?"

"We'll take over the Trusts and run them."...

It is part of the inconveniences attending all powerful new movements
of the human mind that the disciple bolts with the teacher, overstates
him, underlines him, and it is no more than a tribute to the potency
of Marx that he should have paralyzed the critical faculty in a number
of very able men. To them Marx is a final form of truth. They talk
with bated breath of a "classic Socialism," to which no man may add
one jot or one tittle, to which they are as uncritically pledged as
extreme Bible Christians are bound to the letter of the "Word."...

The peculiar evil of the Marxist teaching is this, that it carries the
conception of a necessary economic development to the pitch of
fatalism, it declares with all the solemnity of popular "science" that
Socialism _must_ prevail. Such a fatalism is morally bad for the
adherent; it releases him from the inspiring sense of uncertain
victory, it leads him to believe the stars in their courses will do
his job for him. The common Marxist is apt to be sterile of effort,
therefore, and intolerant--preaching predestination and salvation
without works.

By a circuitous route, indeed, the Marxist reaches a moral position
curiously analogous to that of the disciple of Herbert Spencer. Since
all improvement will arrive by leaving things alone, the worse things
get, the better; for so much the nearer one comes to the final
exasperation, to the class war and the Triumph of the Proletariat.
This certainty of victory in the nature of things makes the Marxists
difficult in politics, pedantic sticklers for the letter of the
teaching, obstinate opponents of what they call "Palliatives"--of any
instalment syste