The supposed iron law of wages has been
proved untrue, so far as labor in civilized countries
is concerned. If we wish now to find examples of
capitalist cruelty analogous to those with which
Marx's book is filled, we shall have to go for most
of our material to the Tropics, or at any rate to
regions where there are men of inferior races to
exploit. Again: the skilled worker of the present day
is an aristocrat in the world of labor. It is a question
with him whether he shall ally himself with the
unskilled worker against the capitalist, or with the
capitalist against the unskilled worker. Very often
he is himself a capitalist in a small way, and if he
is not so individually, his trade union or his friendly
society is pretty sure to be so. Hence the sharpness
of the class war has not been maintained. There
are gradations, intermediate ranks between rich and
poor, instead of the clear-cut logical antithesis
between the workers who have nothing and the capitalists
who have all. Even in Germany, which
became the home of orthodox Marxianism and developed
a powerful Social-Democratic party, nominally
accepting the doctrine of ``Das Kapital'' as all but
verbally inspired, even there the enormous increase
of wealth in all classes in the years preceding the
war led Socialists to revise their beliefs and to adopt
an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary attitude.
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