on and made them see it. They were seeing it
then, as they sat there, and they were frightened by it.

"We started with A B C, Mr. Calvin," Ernest said slyly. "I have now
given you the rest of the alphabet. It is very simple. That is the
beauty of it. You surely have the answer forthcoming. What, then, when
every country in the world has an unconsumed surplus? Where will your
capitalist system be then?"

But Mr. Calvin shook a troubled head. He was obviously questing back
through Ernest's reasoning in search of an error.

"Let me briefly go over the ground with you again," Ernest said. "We
began with a particular industrial process, the shoe factory. We found
that the division of the joint product that took place there was similar
to the division that took place in the sum total of all industrial
processes. We found that labor could buy back with its wages only
so much of the product, and that capital did not consume all of the
remainder of the product. We found that when labor had consumed to the
full extent of its wages, and when capital had consumed all it wanted,
there was still left an unconsumed surplus. We agreed that this surplus
could only be disposed of abroad. We agreed, also, that the effect
of unloading this surplus on another country would be to develop the
resources of that country, and that in a short time that country
would have an unconsumed surplus. We extended this process to all the
countries on the planet, till every country was producing every year,
and every day, an unconsumed surplus, which it could dispose of to no
other country. And now I ask you again, what are we going to do with
those surpluses?"

Still no one answered.

"Mr. Calvin?" Ernest queried.

"It beats me," Mr. Calvin confessed.

"I never dreamed of such a thing," Mr. Asmunsen said. "And yet it does
seem clear as print."

It was the first time I had ever heard Karl Marx's* doctrine of surplus
value elaborated, and Ernest had done it so simply that I, too, sat
puzzled and dumbfounded.

* Karl Marx--the great intellectual hero of Socialism. A
German Jew of the nineteenth century. A contemporary of
John Stuart Mill. It seems incredible to us that whole
generations should have elapsed after the enunciation of
Marx's economic discoveries, in which time he was sneered at
by the world's accepted thinkers and scholars. Because of
his discoveries he was banished from his native country, and