question.  Recognising, as they do, and eagerly proclaiming as they do, whenever they address themselves to those who are capable of serious dispute with them, that the original theory of socialism, which was the creed of such bodies as the International, is absolutely false in itself, and in many of the expectations which it stimulates, why do not they set themselves, whenever they address the multitude, to expose and repudiate a fallacy in which they no longer believe?  Do they do this?  Do they make an attempt to do this?  On the contrary, as a rule, though there are doubtless many honourable exceptions, they endeavour to hide from the multitude their intellectual change of front altogether; and, instead of insisting that the undirected labour of the many is, in the modern world, impotent to produce anything, they continue to speak of it as though it produced everything, and as though no class other than the labouring fulfilled any economic function or had any right to exist.[6]

Let me give the reader an example, which is curiously apt here.  It is taken from Mr. Hillquit’s own attack on myself, which filled the front sheet of a newspaper, and was distributed to the public at the door of one of the buildings in which I spoke.  Of the short passages, amounting to some twenty lines out of six hundred, in which alone he condescended to detailed argument, the first is that in which, as we have already seen, he declares that all socialists know, without any instruction on my part, that common manual labour, unless it is directed by ability, is “impotent to produce the wealth of modern nations.”  But having made this admission with much blowing of trumpets, he immediately drops it, and instead of developing its consequences, he diverts the attention of his readers from it by a long series of irrelevancies; nor does he return to the question of directive ability at all till he is nearing the end of his discourse, when he suddenly takes it up again, declaring that he will meet and refute me on ground which I myself have chosen, and show that wealth—­at all events in the commercial sense—­is still produced by manual labour alone.  He refers to my selection of the case of a printed book, as illustrating, in the manner explained in an earlier chapter, the part which directive ability plays in modern production.  The economic value of an edition of a printed book, I said, as the reader will remember, depends in the most obvious way, not on the labour of compositors, but on the quality of the directions which the author imposes on this labour through his manuscript—­the author’s mind being typical of directive ability generally.  And what has Mr. Hillquit—­the intellectual Ajax of the socialists—­got to say about this?  “Whether a book,” he says, “is a work of genius or mere rubbish will largely affect its literary or artistic value; but it will have very little bearing on its economic or commercial value.”  This, he goes on to argue, will, despite all my objections, be found to depend on ordinary manual labour, of which the labour of the hands of the compositors is that which concerns us most.  Nothing, according to him, can be more evident than this.  “For the market price,” he says, “of a wretched detective story, of the same length as Hamlet, and printed in the same way, will be exactly the same as that of a copy of Hamlet itself.”