But as in a moving world, where all the elements and forces engaged must keep time and pace with each other, no mere statical immoveable ideal of what all men would like to see realized, has any real intellectual value, - inasmuch as it is impotent to show how it is to be realized (and this after all is the only test of intellectual penetration), but at most, like a picture-book for children can only be placarded on the walls of the world as an object-lesson for its imitation - it is not surprising that neither Ruskin nor Mr. Wells should have touched even the fringe of the real subject-matter with which they had to deal; and that far from making any attempt to reconstruct the orthodox Science of Political Economy, which, as we have seen is honeycombed with fallacies from beginning to end, they could only sit wailing and weeping over it, and end by leaving it precisely where it was before; - Ruskin hoping and trusting that one of Carlyle's 'great men' would come along and either persuade or coerce the world into realizing his dream; Mr. Wells, kicking over his own Samurai, and imagining that he could make so complete and harmonious a picture out of the fragments they had dropped by the way, that by its glamour the world might be fascinated into accepting it, - with himself as leader and regenerator! - as if some optician, motor-car manufacturer, or mechanical instrument maker, some over-inflated actor, or what not, were by taking advantage of the popular ignorance on these matters to attempt to throw overboard in their own favour the claims of Faraday, Helmholtz, Kelvin, Newton, or Shakespeare, - on the ground, as he expresses it, that the 'creators of Utopias' are the real founders of the Science of Sociology.

The next of the 'outside' Economists to enter the field was Karl Marx, with his elaborate attempt to found an entirely new system of Political Economy, in the interest of the Working Classes, on two doctrines of Ricardo's which even the orthodox Economists were just then on the point of relinquishing as no longer tenable. The first was the doctrine of the 'iron law of wages,' as it was called (which was itself founded on Malthus' law of Population), and the second, the doctrine of Value, namely that the value of commodities is determined by the quantity of labour necessary to their production.' And the first thing that Marx did was to emasculate this latter doctrine of the truth it contained, by following the example of the orthodox Economists, - whose fallacy of 'averaging' both Profits and Wages we have already seen, - and striking an average of the amount of work done by labourers in a given time, - an hour, a day, a week, or what not, - and then, under the phrase 'average labour-time,' proceeding to stretch on it, as on a rigid Procrustean bed, all labour alike, whether it were that of coal-heavers or inventors, men of brains or men of muscle; subjecting all alike to the same measurement by the pure 'time' of their labour alone.

Indeed had it been a question of the Napoleons of the world versus their private soldiers, the Raphaels versus the sign-painters, Shakespeare versus the ballad-mongers, Wagner versus the players in his orchestra, with whom Marx was dealing, it would logically have been all the same; they would all alike have had to submit to be stretched on this abstract rack of 'labour-time' and to share and share alike according to the number of hours they worked; and I doubt not that if it had been a question of the conquerors and the conquered after a pitched battle, Marx, with his stolid logical inflexibility, would have argued in all seriousness that each side ought to have the same share of the spoils, because they had both fought the same number of hours! Perhaps the strangest theory of human life and labour, the most unabashed attempt to grind down all things - great and small, high and low, knowledge and ignorance, the dynamical forces and the statical, the alive and the dead, - into a common undistinguishing level of undifferentiated sand, that the world has yet seen.

But before enquiring not so much into the truth of it (for as we shall see there is little or none), but into what has so commended it to human beings that whole nations - and these not the least intelligent - have gone mad over it, a word or two as to its purely economic characteristics will suffice to indicate its real position in the evolution of Political Economy. And I may as well begin by saying frankly that it is made up of all the fallacies of the old orthodox Economy, including some which even the academical Economists, who will allow no part of their tradition to be torn from them without a struggle, have been obliged to resign. So that while they have begun to see that Value depends as much on Utility, as expressed in the ' demand ' for a commodity, as it does on the Labour put into it, as expressed in the 'supply,' Marx grossly applies his rigid measuring-rod of Value, - namely length of time alone, - to the production of a commodity, and ignores its consumption altogether. And even here he gets off the track; for the question of Value, even on its purely productive side, is not one of how many units of time you are at work, but of how many units of product you can turn out in a given time - quite a different matter.