SUPPOSED TENDENCIES TO SOCIALISM. 579 



knell of capitalist property will sound, the expropriators will be 

 expropriated." But we can now see that Marx mistook the course 

 of the industrial evolution, and that he prophesied without due 

 allowance for other facts and forces that might check, or cross, or 

 turn the tendency he thought he had divined. 



According to Cairnes also, as we have seen, the tendency is 

 to " an increased inequality in distribution. The rich will grow 

 richer, the poor, at least relatively, poorer." And he recommends 

 to the latter co-operative production as their sole hope. Now, 

 Cairnes's mistake was the less excusable, as he wrote at a time 

 (1874) when the tendency to great individual accumulation had 

 received a check, and there were statistics available that might 

 have tested his deduction. And, in fact, all that his argument 

 really proves is that the class receiving interest (and occasionally 

 wages of management, in addition to interest) tends to get a larger 

 part of the produce than the class that lives by hired wages, or, 

 as he puts it, that the wages fund tends to lag behind the other 

 parts into which capital is divided. This last, if true, would still 

 be a sufficiently serious thing, though Mr. Giffen, the eminent 

 statistician, denies its truth ; but, true or not, it is a quite differ- 

 ent thing from the increasing concentration of wealth in indi- 

 vidual hands, which Cairnes appears, in the above quotations, to 

 think implied in it ; that one class, and a large class, tends to get 

 a somewhat larger share than another and a much larger class 

 would not be a desirable thing if it could be prevented ; it would 

 scarcely be an argument for a total change in our industrial sys- 

 tem, as desired by Cairnes, still less for the further social and po- 

 litical changes desired by advanced socialists. 



According to Comte also (writing in 1850), the tendency was 

 to the greater concentration of capital in the hands of individual 

 capitalists ; he thought the tendency a good one ; far from desir- 

 ing to thwart it by human volitions, he affirmed that the tend- 

 ency would necessarily and beneficially lead to a more pro- 

 nounced capitalism instead of to socialism, and with the capital- 

 ists ruling in the political as well as the industrial sphere so 

 differently did the philosophers forecast the future from the same 

 assumed tendency. 



Now, if the tendency were really to the concentration of capi- 

 tal in ever fewer hands, with a mighty mass of ill-paid and dis- 

 contented workers, and with no great middle class lying between, 

 then indeed the transition to socialism more or less complete 

 would be much easier to accomplish, and in some shape it would 

 probably come ; at least it would be easier to expropriate a com- 

 parative few ; it would be almost impossible to prevent it, the 

 forces of might and justice added to envy being adverse, and 

 with no mediating middle class. Both might and morality would 



