THE 



POPULAR SCIENCE 

 MONTHLY. 



JANUARY, 1887. 



WHAT MAKES THE RICH RICHER AND THE 

 POOR POORER. 



By Professor "WILLIAM G. SUMNEE. 



KARL MARX says, " An accumulation of wealth at one pole of 

 society indicates an accumulation of misery and overwork at 

 the other." * In this assertion, Marx avoids the very common and 

 mischievous fallacy of confusing causes, consequences, and symptoms. 

 He suggests that what is found at one pole indicates, or is a symptom 

 of, what may be found at the other. In the development of his criti- 

 cisms on political economy and the existing organization of society, 

 however, Marx proceeds as if there were a relation of cause and 

 effect in the proposition just quoted, and his followers and popular- 

 izers have assumed as an indisputable postulate that the wealth of 

 some is a cause of the poverty of others. The question of priority 

 or originality as between Marx, Rodbertus, and others, is at best one 

 of vanity between them and their disciples,f but it is of great inter- 

 est and importance to notice that the doctrine that wealth at one pole 

 makes misery at the other is the correct logical form of the notion 

 that progress and poverty are correlative. This doctrine rests upon 

 another and still more fundamental one, which is not often formu- 

 lated, but which can be detected in most of the current socialistic 

 discussions, viz., that all the capital which is here now would be here 

 under any laws or institutions about property, as if it were due to 

 some independent cause, and that some have got ahead of others and 

 seized upon the most of it, so that those who came later have not been 

 able to get any. If this notion about the source of capital is not true, 

 then wealth at one pole can not cause poverty at the other. If it is 



*"Das Capital," i, 671. 



f On this question see Anton Menger, " Das Recht auf den vollen Arbeitsertrag," 

 Stuttgart, 1886. This writer traces back for a century the fundamental socialistic notions. 

 He aims to develop the jural as distinguished from the economic aspect of socialism. 

 vol. xxs. — 19 



