[2] If this fact requires any further exemplification, we can find one on a large scale in the pages of Marx himself.  According to him the first appreciable capitalistic movement—­the first leaping of the modern system in the womb—­took place in the English cloth trade about four hundred years ago.  Now, if capitalism were merely, as according to Marx it is, a passive monopoly by some men of implements which have been produced by others, the pioneers of capitalism in the reign of Henry VIII. would have got into their possession all the hand-looms then in use; they would have taken their toll in kind from all whom they allowed to use them; and there the matter would have ended.  The looms of to-day would be the looms of four hundred years ago.  The passive ownership of machines does nothing to improve their construction.  If a gang of ignorant thieves could steal all the watches in America, and then let them out to the public at so much a month or year, this would not convert the three-dollar watches into chronometers.  And how little mere labour, or the experience gained by labour, tends to improve the implements which the labourer uses is shown by the fact that the looms which wove Anne Boleyn’s petticoats were practically the same as the looms which wove those of Semiramis.

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