CHAPTER V.
REPUDIATION OF MARX BY MODERN SOCIALISTS.
THEIR RECOGNITION OF DIRECTIVE ABILITY In saying that, up to the point which our argument has thus far reached, the more thoughtful among the socialists to-day concede and even assert its truth, I have evidence in view of a very opposite kind.

When I delivered, as I did recently, a series of addresses on socialism to various meetings in America, I approached the subject in the manner in which I have approached it here.

I began with the process of production pure and simple, and I showed how crude and childish, as applied to production in modern times, was the analysis of Marx and all the earlier socialists.

I showed, as I have shown here, that, the amount of labour being given, the quantity and quality of wealth that will result from its exercise depend on the ability with which by means of wage-capital this labour is directed.
The two addresses in which these points were elaborated had no sooner been delivered than, from all parts of the country, through newspapers and private letters, and sometimes by word of mouth, socialists of various types addressed themselves to the business of replying to me.
These replies, whatever may have been their differences otherwise, all took the form of a declaration that I was only wasting my time in exposing the doctrine that labour is the sole producer of wealth, and in laying such stress on the part played by directive ability; for no serious socialist of the present day any longer believed the one, or failed to recognise the other.

Thus one of my critics told me that what I ought to do was "to discuss the principles of socialism as understood and accepted by the intelligent disciples, and not the worn-out and discredited theories of Marx." Another was good enough to tell me that I had "cleverly accomplished the task of exposing the errors of Marx, both of premise and of logic"; but the leaders of socialistic thought "in its later developments" had, he proceeded to say, long ago outgrown these.