SOCIALISTS AND THE AVERAGE MAN 263 



socialists in practice are forced to limit the applica- Book in 

 tion of them to two kinds of social action only ; and 

 these are social activity in the domains of political 

 government and of wealth-production. They are, 

 moreover, applied to the latter of these with so much 

 more strictness than to the former, that the objec- 

 tions to the special claims of the great man as a They cannot . 

 wealth-producer are the only ones that here require theoretical 



niir attention objection to it, 



our attention. for the y are 



Now even here we shall find that the objections beginnin s to N 



J recognise the 



in question are originated not by theoretical, but by importance of 



. , . , . 1 r r i the exceptional 



practical considerations only ; lor one of the most man them- 

 curious features in the history of socialistic thought, se 

 from the time when socialists claim that it first 

 began to be scientific till to-day, has been the unwill- 

 ing replacement, in their theory of production and 

 progress, of that factor or element and this factor 

 is the great man which Karl Marx, with his doctrine 

 of labour as the sole creator of value, had eliminated. 

 Under one disguise or another the great or excep- 

 tional man, as distinct from the average labourer 

 whose productivity is measured by time, has been 

 put back in the place from which the theory of Marx 

 had ousted him ; and the inventors, the men of enter- 

 prise, the organisers and capitalists of to-day or, as 

 Mr. Sidney Webb calls them, "the monopolists of 

 business ability " are given back to us in the guise of 

 officials of the bureaucratic State, armed by the State 

 with the industrial powers of slave -owners. It is 

 true that socialistic theorists still do their utmost to 

 hide from themselves and their followers the nature 



