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 he died an exile in England.

“I’ll tell you a way to get rid of the surplus,” Ernest said.  “Throw it into the sea.  Throw every year hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of shoes and wheat and clothing and all the commodities of commerce into the sea.  Won’t that fix it?”

“It will certainly fix it,” Mr. Calvin answered.  “But it is absurd for you to talk that way.”

Ernest was upon him like a flash.

“Is it a bit more absurd than what you advocate, you machine-breaker, returning to the antediluvian ways of your forefathers?  What do you propose in order to get rid of the surplus?  You would escape the problem of the surplus by not producing any surplus.  And how do you propose to avoid producing a surplus?  By returning to a primitive method of production, so confused and disorderly and irrational, so wasteful and costly, that it will be impossible to produce a surplus.”

Mr. Calvin swallowed.  The point had been driven home.  He swallowed again and cleared his throat.

“You are right,” he said.  “I stand convicted.  It is absurd.  But we’ve got to do something.  It is a case of life and death for us of the middle class.  We refuse to perish.  We elect to be absurd and to return to the truly crude and wasteful methods of our forefathers.  We will put back industry to its pre-trust stage.  We will break the machines.  And what are you going to do about it?”

“But you can’t break the machines,” Ernest replied.  “You cannot make the tide of evolution flow backward.  Opposed to you are two great forces, each of which is more powerful than you of the middle class.  The large capitalists, the trusts, in short, will not let you turn back.  They don’t want the machines destroyed.  And greater than the trusts, and more powerful, is labor.  It will not let you destroy the machines.  The ownership of the world, along with the machines, lies between the trusts and labor.  That is the battle alignment.  Neither side wants the destruction of the machines.  But each side wants to possess the machines.  In this battle the middle class has no place.  The middle class is a pygmy between two giants.  Don’t you see, you poor perishing middle class, you are caught between the upper and nether millstones, and even now has the grinding begun.