Socialism appeals to better classes and has far more strength. Attack the state and you excite feelings of loyalty even among the disaffected classes; but attack the industrial system and appeal to the state, and you may have loyalty in your favor.

A laborer no longer makes whole articles. He receives raw materials, puts his touch on them, and passes them to another worker in the series. When the articles are quite finished they are carried out of sight by currents of commercial exchange. These currents are untraceable.

The decree of a coercive tribunal would not need to conform to the true standard of wages, the final productivity of social labor. It would introduce into distribution a genuinely arbitrary element, with a very large ultimate power to pervert the natural system.

Dull would be the man who should merely tolerate this plan of social industry. Weak would be the position of him who should take an apologetic tone in defending it, or present its claims in a merely negative way, by exposing the evils and perils of the socialistic plan.

If a man were living in isolation his income would be literally his product. Make him the monarch and owner of an island, and the fruits that he raises and the clothing that he makes constitute, in themselves, his income. This ceases to be true when trading begins.

The first issue to be settled is whether socialism has a right to exist Are its allegations concerning the present system true? Is industry proceeding on a principle of fraud? I wish to test the power of recent economic theory to give an exact answer to this question.