Now, if we consider Mr. Hillquit as a purely literary critic, we can but admire his subtlety in discovering that the literary value of a book is largely affected by the fact of the book’s not being rubbish; but when he descends from pure criticism to economics, it is difficult, unless we suppose him to have taken leave of his senses, to imagine that he can himself believe in the medley of nonsense propounded by him.  For what he is here doing—­or more probably pretending to do—­is to confuse the cost of producing an edition of a book with the commercial value of that edition when produced.  The labour in question no doubt determines the price at which the printed paper can be sold at a profit, or without loss; but the number of copies which the public will be willing to buy, or, in other words, the value of the edition commercially, depends on qualities resident in the mind of the author, which render the book attractive to but few readers, or to many.  Whether these qualities amount to genius in the higher sense of the word, or to nothing more than a knack of titillating the curiosity of the vulgar, does not affect the question.  In either case—­and this is the sole important fact—­they are qualities of the author’s mind, and of the author’s mind alone; and the labour of the compositors conduces to the production of a pile of volumes which is of large, of little, or of no value commercially, not according to the dexterity with which this labour is performed, but according to the manner in which the author’s mind directs it.

Than any human being who is capable of perceiving that the literary quality of a book is largely affected by the fact of the book’s not being rubbish, should seriously suppose that the saleable value of editions—­whether they are editions of a popular novel, or of a treatise on the conchology of Kamchatka, is proportionate to the number of letters in them arranged in parallel lines—­for Mr. Hillquit’s argument means neither more nor less than this—­is, let me repeat, incredible.  What, then, is the explanation of his indulging in a performance of this degrading kind?  The explanation is that he, like so many of his colleagues, though recognising personally that labour among “modern nations” depends for its higher productivity on the picked men who direct it, cannot bring himself to renounce, when he is making his appeal to the masses, the old doctrine that they are the sole producers; and accordingly having started with the ostentatious admission that directive ability is as essential to production as labour is, he endeavours by his verbal jugglery with the case of a printed book to convey the impression that labour produces all values after all; and he actually manages to wind up with a repetition of the old Marxian moral that the profits of ability mean nothing but labour which has not been paid for.[7]