Shortly after my arrival in America, in the winter of 1907, the most active disseminator of socialistic literature in New York sent me, by way of a challenge, a new and very spruce volume, which contained the most important of his previous leaflets and articles, collected and republished, and claiming renewed attention.

The first of these--and it was signalised by an accompanying advertisement as fundamental--bore the impressive title of, "Why the Working Man should be a Socialist," and the answer to this question is given in the writer's opening words.

"You know," he says, addressing any labourer and the street-worker, "or you ought to know, that you alone produce all the good things of life; and you know, or you ought to know, that by so simple a process as that of casting your ballot intelligently you will be able"-- to do what?
The writer explains himself in language which, except for a difference in his statistics, is almost a verbal repetition of that of his English predecessors.

He specifies two sums, one representing the income which each working-man in America would receive were the entire wealth of the country divided equally among the manual labourers; the other representing the income which, on an average, he actually receives as wages; and the writer tells every working man that, by "merely casting his ballot intelligently," he can secure for himself the whole difference between the larger sum and the less.[5] But the fact that the Marxian doctrine of the all-productivity of labour, and the consequent economic nullity of all other forms of effort, still supplies the main ideas by which popular socialism is vitalised, is shown perhaps even more distinctly by the popular hopes and demands which result from this doctrine indirectly than it is by the direct reassertion of the formal doctrine itself.

One of the members of the Parliamentary Labour party in England celebrated his success at the polls by a letter to the _Times_, proclaiming that socialism was a moral quite as much as an economic movement, and that an object which to socialists was dearer even than the seizure of the riches of the rich, was the achievement of "economic freedom," or, in other words, the "emancipation of labour," or, in other words again, the abolition of the system which he described as "wagedom." I merely mention the particular letter in question in order to remind the reader of these familiar phrases, which are current in every country where the theory of socialism has spread itself.
Now, what does all this talk about the emancipation of labour mean?
It can only mean one or other of two things: either that the economic prosperity of every nation in the future will depend on the emancipation of every average mind from the guidance of any minds that are in any way superior to itself, or are able to enhance the productivity of an average pair of hands--a proposition so ludicrous that nobody would consciously assent to it; or else it means a continued assent to the theory which fails to correlate labour with directive ability at all, and so never raises the question of whether the latter is necessary or no.
What, then, becomes of that chorus of vehement protestations, with which my critics in America were all so eager to overwhelm me, to the effect that socialists to-day recognise as clearly as I do that "common manual labour," as Mr.Hillquit puts it, "is impotent to produce the wealth of modern nations," apart from the "organisation and control" of the minds most competent to direct it?
That the more intellectual socialists of to-day do recognise this fact--some with greater and some with less distinctness--is the very point on which I am anxious to insist.