SHOOTING NIAGARA

himself. So soon as they realised that their ?

happiness lay not in their action as individuals, *&.

poor and ill-educated they were powerless, but i&tjl

strength, their final victory was certain. blished

In his great work, Capital, first obscurely p
"amid carjbundes and the constant dunning °* cre , - TT
1867, Karl Marx demonstrated the course events were ^j
saw that with its ever-increasing scale of operatic*18 caF *
was digging its own grave. The evolution of a society wni pu
its faith in figures was predestined. "While there is thus a pro-
gressive diminution in the number of capitalist magnates . . .
there octurs a corresponding increase in the mass 01 pover y,
oppression, enslavement, degeneration and exploitation; but at
the same time there is a steady intensification of the wrath ot the
working class—a class which grows ever more numerous and is
disciplined, unified and organised by the very mechanism ot the
capitalist method of production. Capitalist monopoly becomes
a fetter upon the method of production which has flourished with
it and under it. The centralisation of the means of production
and the socialisation of labour reach a point where they prove
incompatible with their capitalist husk. This bursts asunder.
The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators
are expropriated."

To Marx's logical, academic but violence-loving mind the
inevitable end was revolution. Divorced by his circumstances
and temperament from the contacts of normal life and society,1
this morose prophet never grasped the nature of the people whose
•commercial institutions he studied with such brilliant and
prophetic insight. He failed to see that in an ancient country
like England, with its strong social character and representative
institutions, revolution would be deflected into smoother
channels. There would be no explosion, only a gradual
process.

The great change that Marx predicted happened. But
it took place in so unexpected a way that nobody, not even
Marx, realised that it was happening at all. The utilitarians
thesis, which supported laissez-faire^ involved the extension of
the vote to the poor man. He used it to obtain legislation to
offset his disability in contracting power. In England the passage

3 His mother, Martha-like, reflected the spirit of her age in wishing that her Karl
would make some capital instead of writing about it.