INDUSTRIAL VILLAGES. 327 



against social democracy. On the other hand, 

 the social democrats, justly opposed to such 

 measures, but themselves inclined, in their turn, 

 to take too abstract a view of economical ques- 

 tions, bitterly attack all those who do not 

 merely repeat the stereotyped phrases to the 

 effect that " the petty trades are in decay," 

 and " the sooner they disappear the better," 

 as they will give room to capitalist centralisa- 

 tion, which, according to the social democratic 

 creed, " will soon achieve its own ruin." In 

 this dislike of the small industries they are, 

 of course, at one with the economists of the 

 orthodox school, whom they combat on nearly 

 all other points.* 



* The foundation for this creed is contained in one of the 

 concluding chapters of Marx's Kapital (the last but one), in 

 which the author spoke of the concentration of capital and saw 

 in it the " fatality of a natural law." In the " forties," this 

 idea of " concentration of capital," originated from what was 

 going on in the textile industries, was continually recurring in 

 the writings of all the French socialists, especially Considerant, 

 and their German followers, and it was used by them as an 

 argument in favour of the necessity of a social revolution. 

 But Marx was too much of a thinker that he should not have 

 taken notice of the subsequent developments of industrial life, 

 which were not foreseen in 1848 ; if he had lived now, he surely 

 would not have shut his eyes to the formidable growth of the 

 numbers of small capitalists and to the middle-class fortunes 

 which are made in a thousand ways under the shadow of the 

 modern " millionaires." Very likely he would have noticed 

 also the extreme slowness with which the wrecking of small 

 industries goes on a slowness which could not be predicted 

 fifty or forty years ago, because no one could foresee at that 

 time the facilities which have been offered since for transport, 



