CHAPTER V. THE FEDERALISM OF CARL MARLO.

Marlo and Rodbertus are sometimes spoken of as the precursors of German socialism. This, however, is a mistake. The socialism which now exists appeared in Germany among the Young Hegelians forty years ago, before the writings of either of these economists were published, and their writings have had very little influence on the present movement. Rodbertus, it is true, communicated a decided impulse to Lassalle, both by his published letter to Von Kirchmann in 1853, and by personal correspondence subsequently. He was a landed proprietor of strongly liberal opinions, who was appointed Minister of Agriculture in Prussia in 1848, but after a brief period of office retired to his estates, and devoted himself to economic and historical study. He took a very decided view of the defects of the existing industrial system, and held in particular that, in accordance with Ricardo's law of necessary wages, the labourer's income could never rise permanently above the level of supplying him with a bare subsistence, and consequently that, while his labour was always increasing in productivity, through mechanical inventions and other means, the share which he obtained of the product was always decreasing. What was required was simply to get this tendency counteracted, and to devise arrangements by which the labourer's share in the product might increase proportionally with the product itself, for otherwise the whole working population would be left behind by the general advancement of society. The remedy, he conceives, must lie in the line of a fresh contraction of the sphere of private property. That sphere had been again and again contracted in the interests of personal development, and it must be so once more. And the contraction that was now necessary was to leave nothing whatever in the nature of private property except income. This proposal is substantially identical with the scheme of the socialists; it is just the nationalization of all permanent stock; but then he holds that it could not be satisfactorily carried out in less than five hundred years. Rodbertus's writings have never been widely known, but they attracted some attention among the German working class, and he was invited, along with Lassalle and Lothar Bucher, to address the Working Men's Congress in Leipzig in 1863. He promised to come and speak on the law of necessary wages, but the Congress was never held in consequence of the action of Lassalle in precipitating his own movement, and from that movement Rodbertus held entirely aloof. He agreed with Lassalle's complaints against the present order of things, but he disapproved of his plan of reform. He did not think the scheme of founding productive associations on State credit either feasible or desirable, and he would still retain the system of wages, though with certain improvements introduced by law. He thought, moreover, that Lassalle erred gravely in making the socialists a political party, and that they should have remained a purely economic one. Besides, he looked on it as mere folly to expect, with Lassalle, the accomplishment in thirty years of changes which, as we have seen, he believed five centuries little enough time to evolve.

Rodbertus may thus be said to have had some relations with the present movement, but Marlo stands completely apart from it: and his large and important work, "Untersuchungen über die Organization der Arbeit, oder System der Weltökonomie," published at Kassel in 1850-5—though original, learned, and lucid—remained so absolutely unknown that none of the lexicons mention his name, and even an economist like Schaeffle—who was the first to draw public attention to it, and has evidently been considerably influenced by it himself—had never read it till he was writing his own work on socialism (1870). But though Marlo cannot be said to have contributed in any respect to the present socialistic movement, his work deserves attentive consideration as a plea for fundamental social reform, advanced by a detached and independent thinker, who has given years of patient study to the phenomena of modern economic life, and holds them to indicate the presence of a deep-seated and widespread social disease. Carl Marlo is the nom de plume of a German professor of chemistry named Winkelblech, and he gives us in the preface to his second volume a touching account of how he came to apply himself to social questions. In 1843 he made a tour of investigation through Northern Europe in connection with a technological work he was engaged in writing, and visited among other places the blue factory of Modum, in Norway, where he remained some days, charmed with the scenery, which he thought equal to that of the finest valleys of the Alps. One morning he went up to a neighbouring height, whence he could see the whole valley, and was calmly enjoying the view when a German artisan came to ask him to undertake some commission to friends in the fatherland. They engaged in conversation. The artisan went over his experiences, and repeated all the privations he and his fellows had to endure. His tale of sorrow, so alien apparently to the ravishing beauty around, made a profound impression on Winkelblech, and altered the purpose and work of his life. "What is the reason," he asked himself, "that the paradise before my eyes conceals so much misery? Is nature the source of all this suffering, or is it man that is to blame for it? I had before, like so many men of science, looked, while in workshops, only on the forges and the machinery, not on the men—on the products of human industry, and not on the producers, and I was quite a stranger to this great empire of misery that lies at the foundation of our boasted civilization. The touching words of the artisan made me feel the nullity of my scientific work and life in its whole extent, and from that moment I resolved to make the sufferings of our race, with their causes and remedies, the subject of my studies." He pursued these studies with the greatest industry for several years, and found the extent of men's sufferings to be greatly beyond his expectation. Poverty prevailed everywhere—among labourers and among employers, too—with peoples of the highest industrial development, and with peoples of the lowest—in luxurious cities, and in the huts of villagers—in the rich plains of Lombardy, no less than the sterile wilds of Scandinavia. He arrived at the conclusion that the causes of all this lay not in nature, but in the fact that human institutions rested on false economic foundations, and he held the only possible remedy to consist in improving these institutions. He became convinced that technical perfection of production, however great, would never be able to extinguish poverty or lead to the diffusion of general comfort, and that civilization was now come to a stage in its development at which further progress depended entirely on the advancement of political economy. Political economy was, therefore, for our time the most important of all sciences, and Winkelblech now determined to give himself thoroughly to its study. Hitherto he had not done so. "During the progress of my investigations," he says, "the doctrines of economists, as well as the theories of socialists, remained almost unknown to me except in name, for I intentionally abstained from seeking any knowledge of either, in order that I might keep myself as free as possible from extraneous influences. It was only after I arrived at the results described that I set myself to a study of economic literature, and came to perceive that the substance of my thoughts, though many of them were not new, and stood in need of correction, departed completely from the accepted principles of the science." He reached the conclusion that there prevailed everywhere the symptoms of a universal social disease, and that political economy was the only physician that could cure it; but that the prevailing system of economy was quite incompetent for that task, and that a new system was urgently and indispensably required. To set forth such a system is the aim of his book. He derides Proudhon's idea of social reforms coming of themselves without design, and argues strongly that no reform worthy the name can ever be expected except as the fruit of economic researches. He agrees with the Socialists in so far as they seek to devise a new economic system, but he thinks they make a defective diagnosis of the disease, and propose an utterly inadequate remedy. He counts them entirely mistaken in attributing all existing evils to the unequal distribution of wealth, a deficiency of production being, in his opinion, a much more important source of misery than any error of distribution. In fact, his fundamental objection to the existing distribution is that it is not the distribution which conduces to the highest production, or to the most fruitful use of the natural resources at the command of society. He differs from the German socialists in always looking at the question from the standpoint of society in general, rather than from that of the proletariat alone, and he maintains that a new organization of labour is even more necessary for the interest of the capitalists than for that of the labourers, because he believes the present system will infallibly lead, unless amended, to the overthrow of the capitalist class, and the introduction of communism. His point of view is moreover purely economic and scientific, entirely free from all partizan admixture, and while he declares himself to be a zealous member of the republican party, he says that he purposely abstains from intervention in politics because he regards the political question as one of very minor rank, and holds that, with sound social arrangements, people could live more happily under the Russian autocracy than, with unsound ones, they could do under the French republic. The organization of labour is, in his opinion, something quite independent of the form of the State, and its final aim ought to be to produce the amount of wealth necessary to diffuse universal comfort among the whole population without robbing the middle classes. These characteristics sufficiently separate him from the socialist democrats of the present day.

His book was published gradually in parts, sometimes after long intervals, between 1848 and 1856, and it was finally interrupted by his death in 1865. A second edition appeared in 1885, containing some additions from his manuscripts, but the work remains incomplete. It was to have consisted of three parts; 1st, a historical part, containing an exposition and estimate of the various economic systems; 2nd, an elementary or doctrinal part, containing an exposition of the principles of economic science; and, 3rd, a practical part, explaining his plan for the organization of labour. The first two parts are all we possess; the third, and most important, never appeared, which must be regretted by all who recognise the evidences of original power and singular candour that the other parts present.

Marlo's account of the social problem is that it arises from the fact that our present industrial organization is not in correspondence with the idea of right which is recognised by the public opinion of the time. That idea of right is the Christian one, which takes its stand on the dignity of manhood, and declares that all men, simply because they are men, have equal rights to the greatest possible happiness. Up till the French Revolution, the idea of right that prevailed was the heathen one, which might be called the divine right of the stronger. The weak might be made a slave without wrong. He might be treated as a thing and not as a person or an equal, who had the same right with his master or his feudal superior to the greatest possible enjoyment. Nature belonged to the conqueror, and his dominion was transmitted by privilege. Inequality of right was therefore the characteristic of this period; Marlo calls it monopolism. But at the French Revolution the Christian idea of right rose to its due ascendancy over opinion, and the sentiments of love and justice began to assume a control over public arrangements. Do as you would be done by, became a rule for politics as well as for private life, and the weak were supported against the strong. Equality of right was the mark of the new period; Marlo calls it panpolism. This idea could not be realized before the present day, because it had never before taken possession of the public mind, but it has done this now so thoroughly that it cannot be expected to rest till it has realized itself in every direction in all the practical applications of which it is susceptible. The final arbiter of institutions is always the conception of right prevailing at the time; contemporary industrial arrangements are out of harmony with the contemporary conception of right; and stability cannot be looked for until this disturbance is completely adjusted.

Now the first attempts that society made to effect this adjustment were not unnaturally attended with imperfection. In the warmth of their recoil from the evils of monopolism, men ran into extreme and distorted embodiments of the opposite principle, and they ran contrary ways. These contrary ways are Liberalism and Communism. Liberalism fixed its attention mainly on the artificial restrictions, the privileges, the services, the legal bonds by which monopoly and inequality were kept up, and it thought a perfect state of society would be brought about if only every chain were snapped and every fetter stripped away. It conceived the road to the greatest possible happiness for every man was the greatest possible freedom; it idolized the principle of abstract liberty, and it fancied if evil did not disappear, it was always because something still remained that needed emancipation. Communism, on the other hand, kept its eyes on the inequalities of monopolistic society; imagined the true road to the greatest possible happiness was the greatest possible equality; that all ills would vanish as soon as things were levelled enough; in short, it idolized the principle of abstract equality. Modern Liberalism and modern Communism are therefore of equal birth; they have the same historical origin in the triumph of the principle of equality of right in 1789; they are only different modes of attempting to reduce that principle to practice; and Liberalism happens to be the more widely disseminated of the two, not because it represents that principle better, but merely because being more purely negative than the other, it was easier of introduction, and so got the start of Communism in the struggle of existence. According to Marlo, they are both equally bad representatives of the principle, and their chief good lies in their mutual criticism, by means of which they prepare the way for the true system, the system of Federalism, which will be presently explained. The history of revolution, he says, begins in the victory of Liberalism and Communism together over Monopolism; it proceeds by the conflict of the victors with one another, and it ends in the final triumph of Federalism over both.

Marlo next criticises the two systems of Liberalism and Communism with considerable acuteness. Both the one and the other are utopias; they are absorbed in realizing an abstract principle, and they, as a matter of fact, produce exactly the opposite of what they aim at. Communism seeks to reach the greatest possible happiness by introducing first the greatest possible equality. But what is equality? Is it equality when each man gets a coat of the same size, or is it not rather when each man gets a coat that fits him? Some communists would accept the former alternative. They would measure off the same length to the dwarf and the giant, to the ploughman and the judge, to the family of three and the family of thirteen. But this would be clearly not equality, but only inequality of a more vicious and vexatious kind. Most communists, however, prefer the second alternative, and assign to every man according to his needs, to every man the coat that fits him. But then we must first have the cloth, and that is only got by labour, and every labourer ought if possible to produce his own coat. The motive to labour, however, is weakened on the communistic system; and if those who work less are to be treated exactly like those who work more, then that would be no abolition of monopoly, but merely the invention of a new monopoly, the monopoly of indolence and incapacity. The skilful and industrious would be exploited by the stupid and lazy. Besides, production would for the same reason, insufficient inducement to labour, be diminished, progress would be stopped, and therefore the average of human happiness would decline. Communism thus conducts to the opposite of everything it seeks. It seeks equality, it ends in inequality; it seeks the abolition of monopoly, it creates a new monopoly; it seeks to increase happiness, it actually diminishes it. It is a pure utopia, and why? Because it misunderstands its own principle. Equality does not mean giving equal things to every man; it means merely affording the greatest possible playroom for the development of every personality, and that is exactly the principle of freedom. The greatest possible equality and the greatest possible freedom can only be realized together; they must spring out of the same conditions, and a system of right which shall adjust these conditions is just what is now wanted.

Liberalism is a failure from like causes. It seeks to realize happiness by freedom; it realizes neither. For it mistakes the nature of freedom, as the Communists mistake the nature of equality. It takes freedom to be the power of doing what one likes, instead of being the power of doing what is right. Its whole bent is to exempt as much as possible of life from authoritative restraint, and to give as much scope as exigencies will allow to the play of individuality. It is based on no positive conception of right whatever, and looks on the State as an alien whose interference is something exceptional, only justified on occasional grounds of public necessity or general utility. It fails to see that there are really no affairs in a community which are out of relation to the general wellbeing, and destitute of political significance. Nothing demonstrates the error of this better than the effects of the Liberal régime itself. For half a century the industrial concerns of the people have been treated as matters of purely private interest, and this policy has resulted in a political as well as economical revolution. Industrial freedom, which has produced capitalism in the economic field, has resulted in political life in the ascendancy of a new class, a plutocracy, "the worst masters," said De Tocqueville, "the world has yet seen, though their reign will be short." The change which was effected by the legislation of the Revolution was not a development of a fourth estate, as is sometimes said; it was really nothing more than the creation of a money aristocracy, and the putting of them in the place of the old hereditary nobility. The system of industrial right that happens to prevail, therefore, so far from being, as Liberals fancy, outside the sphere of political interest, is in truth the very element on which the distribution of political power, in the last analysis, depends. Nothing is more political than the social question. Liberals think slight of that question, but it is, says Marlo, the real question of the day, and it is neither more nor less than the question of the existence or abolition of Liberalism, the question of the maintenance or subversion of the principle of industrial freedom, the question of the ascendancy or overthrow of a money aristocracy. The fight of our age is a fight against a plutocracy bred of Liberalism. It is not, as some represent it, a struggle of labourers against employers; it is a joint struggle of labourers and lower bourgeoisie against the higher bourgeoisie, a struggle of those who work and produce against those who luxuriate idly on the fruits of others' labour. As compared with this question, constitutional questions are of very minor importance, for no matter whether the State be monarchy or republic, if the system of industrial right that prevails in it be the system of industrial freedom, the real power of the country will be in the hands of the capitalist class. He who fails to see this, says Marlo, fails to understand the spirit of his time. It is always the national idea of right that governs both in social and political relations, and as long as the national idea of right is that of Liberalism, we shall continue to have capitalism and a plutocracy. It is the mind that builds the body up, and it is only when a new system of right has taken as complete possession of the national consciousness as Liberalism did in 1789, that the present social conflict will cease and a better order of things come in.

From want of such a system of right—from want even of seeing the necessity for it, Liberalism has defeated its own purpose. It sought to abolish monopoly; it has only substituted for the old monopoly of birth the more grievous monopoly of wealth. It sought to establish freedom; it has only established plutocratic tyranny. It has erred because it took for freedom an abstraction of its own and tried to realize that, just as Communism erred by taking for equality an abstraction of its own and trying to realize that. The most perfect state of freedom is not reached when every man has the power of doing what he likes, any more than the most perfect state of equality is reached when every man has equal things with every other; but the greatest possible freedom is attained in a condition of society where every man has the greatest possible play-room for the development of his personality, and the greatest possible equality is attained in exactly the same state of things. Real freedom and real equality are in fact identical. Every right contains from the first a social element as well as an individual element, and it cannot be realized in the actual world without observing a due adjustment between these two elements. Such an adjustment can only be discovered by a critical examination of the economic constitution of society, and must then be expressed in a distinct system of industrial right, which imposes on individual action its just limits. True liberty is liberty within these limits; and the true right of property is a right of property under the same conditions. The fundamental fault of Liberalism, the cause of its failure, is simply that it goes to work without a sound theory of right, or rather perhaps without any clear theory at all, and merely aims at letting every one do as he likes, with the understanding that the State can always be called in to correct accidents and excesses.

This defect is what Federalism claims to supply. It claims to be the only theory that abandons abstractions and keeps closely to the nature of things, and therefore to be the only theory that is able to realize even approximately the Christian principle of equality of right. The name furnishes no very precise clue to the conclusion it designates, and it has no reference to the federative form of State, for which Marlo expressly disavows having any partiality. He has chosen the word merely to indicate the fact that society is an organic confederation of many different kinds of associations—families, churches, academies, mercantile companies, and so on; that association is not only a natural form, but the natural form in which man's activity tends to be carried on; and that in any sound system of industrial right this must be recognised by an extension of the collective form of property and the co-operative form of production. Communism, says Marlo, is mechanical, Liberalism is atomistic, but Federalism is organic. When he distinguishes his theory from communism, it must be remembered that it is from the communism which he has criticised, and which he would prefer to denominate Equalism; it is from the communism of Baboeuf, which would out of hand give every man according to his needs, and would consequently, through impairing the motives to industry, leave those needs themselves in the long run less satisfactorily provided for than they are now. But his system is nearly identical with the communism of the Young Hegelians of his own time—that is, with the German socialism of the present day—although he arrived at it in entire independence of their agitations, and builds it on deductions peculiar to himself. Like them, he asks for the compulsory transformation of land and the instruments of production from private property into collective property; like them, he asks for this on grounds of social justice, as the necessary mechanism for giving effect to positive rights that are set aside under the present system; and he says himself, "If you ask the question, how is the democratic social republic related to Federalism, the most suitable answer is, as the riddle to its solution."

He starts from the position that all men have equally the right to property. Not merely in the sense, which is commonly acknowledged, that they have the right to property if they have the opportunity of acquiring it; but in the further significance, that they have a right to the opportunity. They are in fact born proprietors—de jure at least, and they are so for two reasons. First, God has made them persons, and not things, and they have, therefore, all equally a natural right to their amplest personal development. If society interferes with this liberty of personal development—if it suffers any of its members to become the slaves of others, for example—it robs them of original rights which belong to them by the mere fact of their manhood. But, secondly, property, resources of some sort, being indispensable means of personal development, God, who has imposed the end, has supplied the means. He has given nature, the earth and the lower creation, into the dominion of man, not of this or that man, or class of men, but of mankind, and consequently every man has, equally with every other, a right to participate in the dominion of nature, a right to use its bounty to the extent required for his personal development. No appropriation of nature can be just which excludes this possibility and robs any man of this natural right. It is, therefore, wrong to allow to any single person, or to any limited number of persons, an absolute dominion over natural resources in which everybody else has, by nature, a right to some extent to share. He who should have complete and exclusive lordship over all nature, would be lord and master of all his fellow-men, and in a period after natural agents are all appropriated the system of complete and absolute property leaves the new-comers at the mercy of those who are already in possession. They can only work if the latter give them the productive instruments; they can only reap from their work so much of its fruits as the latter are pleased to leave with them; and they must perish altogether unless the latter employ them. They are slaves, they are beggars; and yet they came into the world with the rights of a proprietor, of which they can never be divested. Nature laid covers for them as well as for the rest, and a system of property is essentially unjust which ousts them from their seat at her table. The common theory of property starts from the premiss, that all men have the right to property, and draws the conclusion, that, therefore, some men have the right to monopolize it. As usually understood, the proprietary right is as much a right of robbery as a right of property, and Proudhon would have been quite correct in describing property as theft, if no better system of property could be devised than the present.

But such a system can be devised; one under which the right of new-comers may be respected without disturbing those of possessors. This can only be done by putting entirely aside the complete and absolute form of property which is in so much favour with Liberalism, and by making the right of property in any actual possession a strictly limited and circumscribed right from the first—the right not to an arbitrary control over a thing, but to a just control over it. So long as property is always thought of as an arbitrary and absolute dominion over a thing, the proprietary right cannot possibly be explained in a way that does not make it a right given to some to rob others. Why not, therefore, define property from the beginning as subject to limitations, and contrive a new form or system of it, in which these limitations shall for ever receive due recognition, and no man be thereafter denied the opportunity of acquiring as much of the bounty of nature as is necessary for him to carry out his personal development?

That is Marlo's task, and it would have been an easy one, if all goods, if everything that satisfies a human want, had been supplied directly by nature, as air is supplied, without the need of industry to procure it or the power of industry to multiply it. Then the problem would be solved very simply as the earlier communists desired to solve it. Every member of society would be entitled to partake of nature's supplies, as he now does of air, in the measure of his need, and when those supplies ran exhausted, just as when the air became vitiated, society would be entitled, nay obliged, to suppress further propagation. But the question is far from being so simple. Nature only yields her bounties to us after labour; they are only converted into means of life by labour; and they are capable of being vastly multiplied by labour. This element of labour changes the situation of things considerably, and must be allowed a leading rôle in determining a just right and system of property. The only case where a proprietary right can be recognised which is unmodified by this consideration, is the case of those who are unable to labour. They fall back on their original right to a share in the bounty of nature in the measure that their personal development requires; in other words, according to their needs. Their share does not lie waste, though they are unable to work it themselves, and their share belongs to them immediately because they are persons, and not because they may afterwards become labourers. Marlo recognises, therefore, antecedently to labour the right to existence, and this right he proposes to realize for the weak and disabled by means of a compulsory system of national insurance.

The other natural proprietary rights are consequent in one way or another upon labour. First, there is the right to labour. If every man has a right to a share in the dominion of nature, then every man who is able to labour has a right to obtain the natural resources that are necessary to give him employment according to capacity and trade. No private appropriation of these resources can divest him of his title to get access to them, and if he cannot find work himself, the State is bound to provide it for him in public workshops. Second, every man has a right to the most profitable possible application of labour to natural resources. He has an interest in seeing the common stock put to the best account, and he is wronged in this interest when waste is permitted, when inferior methods are resorted to, or when the distribution of work and materials is ill arranged. Now the best arrangement is when each man is equipped according to the measure and quality of his powers. Nature will be then best worked, and man's personal development will then be best furthered. If such an arrangement cannot be effected on the system of property now in vogue, while it may be under another, it is every man's right to have the former system supplanted by the latter. The most economical form of property is the most just. Third, the next right is a right to an almost unlimited control over the fruits of one's own labour. Not over the means of labour; these can only be justly or economically held by a circumscribed control; but over the fruits of labour. These ought to be retained as exclusive property, for the simple reason that the natural resources will be so turned to the best account. On any other system of payment the motive to labour is impaired, and the amount of its produce diminished. Distribution by need defeats its own end; the very needs of the community would be less amply satisfied after it than before it. Distribution according to work is the sound economic principle, and therefore the just one. Marlo here leaves room for the play of the hereditary principle and of competition to some extent, and he allows the free choice of occupation on similar grounds. Men will work best in lines their own tastes and powers lead them to. Everything is determined by economic utility, and economic utility is supposed to be at its height when the natural resources of a country are distributed among its inhabitants according to the requirements of their labouring powers.

This condition of things can only be realized, first, if population is regulated; second, if unproductive labour is suppressed; and third, if the means of labour are made common property. The necessity for regulating population comes, of course, from the limitation of the natural resources at society's command. In any community there is a certain normal limit of population—the limit at which all the natural resources are distributed among all the inhabitants according to their powers—and the community will learn when this limit is reached from the number of workmen who are unable to obtain private employment, and are obliged to seek work from the State. Then it can regulate population by various expedients. It may require the possession of a certain amount of fortune as a preliminary condition to marriage, and raise this amount according to necessity. It may encourage emigration. It may forbid marriages under a fixed age, and to prevent illegitimacy, it might give natural children the same rights as legitimate ones. But Marlo trusts most to the strong preventive check that would be supplied by the power imparted to working men under the Federal régime of improving their position.

The same necessity that makes it legitimate, and, indeed, imperative to regulate population, makes it legitimate and imperative also to suppress what Marlo calls unproductive acquisition, i.e., the acquisition by persons who are able to work of any other property than they earn as the fruit of their work; and to suppress likewise all waste of the means of life and enjoyment, such, for example, as is involved in the maintenance of unnecessary horses, dogs, or other animals that only eat up the products of the soil. The obligation to labour and the curtailment of luxury would come into exercise before the restrictions on population, and be more and more rigorously enforced as the normal limit of population was approximated.

But the most important and the most necessary innovation is the conversion of land and the instruments of production into the form of collective property. The form in which property should be held ought to be strictly determined by considerations of economic utility. From such considerations the Liberals themselves have introduced important changes into the system of property; they have abolished fiefs, hereditary tenancies, entail, servitudes, church and village lands, all the peculiarities of monopolistic society, because, as they said, they wished to substitute a good form of property for a bad; and they at least have no right, Marlo thinks, to turn round now on Communists or Federalists for proposing to supersede this good form of property by a better. They have themselves transformed property by law, and they have transformed it on grounds of economic advantage; they have owned that the economic superiority of a particular form of property imposes a public obligation for its compulsory introduction. They asserted the competency of the State against the monopolists, and they cannot now deny it against the socialists. If the private form of property is best, then let the State maintain it; but if the collective form is best, then the State is bound, even on the principles of Liberals themselves, to introduce it. The question can only be determined by experience of the comparative economic utility of the two. Without offering any detailed proof of his proposition from experience Marlo then affirms that the most advantageous form of property is reached when the instruments of production are the collective property of associations, and the instruments of enjoyment (except wells, bridges, and the like) are the property of individuals. Each man's house would still be his castle; his house and the fulness thereof would still belong to him; but outside of it he could acquire no individual possessions. Of land and the means of labour, he should be joint-proprietor with others, or rather joint-tenant with them under the Crown. Industrial property would be held in common by the associations that worked it, and these associations would be organized by authority with distinct charters of powers and functions.

Marlo thus arrives at the same practical scheme as Marx, though by a slightly different road. Marx builds his claim on Ricardo's theory of value and Ricardo's law of necessary wages. Marlo builds his on man's natural right, as a sharer in the dominion of nature, to the most advantageous exercise of that dominion.