Nevertheless, the organisation of the proletariat, and his journalistic labours, however intense and however weighty, did not represent in the life of Marx anything more than a vexatious parenthesis or a regrettable delay in the fulfilment of the supreme task he had set before himself from the very outset of his life in Britain. Hardly, in fact, had Marx settled down in the wonderful town of London, to the economist so inexhaustible a field for study and experience, than he proposed to rebuild from the foundations the entire edifice of his economic and statistical knowledge, which was at that time comparatively small when contrasted with the vast extent of his preliminary readings in philosophy. In the British Museum library, therefore, he plunged into the study of the classical economists of the island realm, showing inexhaustible patience in tracing the earliest and most trifling ramifications of economic science.

Beginning with the study of the theory of rent, he went on to the study of money, of the relationship between the quantity of metal in circulation and the rate of exchange, of the influence of bank reserves upon prices, and so forth. He then devoted himself to the theories of value, profit, interest, and population. Simultaneously he studied without remission statistics, blue books, ministerial and parliamentary concerns.

From all this gigantic toil he derived the materials for the writing of the work which was henceforward to be at once the sorrow and the joy of his life. His first intention was to limit himself to a critical history of political economy, or a detailed analysis of the theories which he had so often enunciated, as well as of the lacunae which had become apparent in them. But an unexpected result issued from the mental contact with this huge mass of science and analysis, for he believed that he had made a splendid and startling discovery whereby the sacred theory of profit could be utterly exploded.

Now, therefore, he outlined the design of his great work, which was to consist of two parts; a first, historico-critical, intended to elucidate the different forms of the theory of profit as expounded by the various British economists; and a second, theoretical and constructive, which was to announce to the world the author's own doctrine. This method of exposition is substantially identical with that followed by BÖhm-Bawerk in his Capital and Interest, and it corresponds moreover to the immediate requirements of the investigation, which ought to begin with the study of prevailing opinions and doctrines, and then only proceed to innovation. But a more attentive examination of the question soon convinced Marx that this would not be the most efficacious method of furnishing a theoretical reproduction of actualities, since, to this end, we must let the phenomena tell their own tale before we proceed to call to account those who have already analysed them, and before we draw attention to the ways in which their conception of the facts diverges from that which reality, when directly questioned, reveals. The method has ever been preferred by the most gifted theorists, and has been applied by Bergson with admirable dexterity in his Creative Evolution. Marx, therefore, never weary of destroying and refashioning, inverted his original design, and promptly began the study and analysis of concrete phenomena, to proceed then only to a criticism of the theories of his precursors. It was in accordance with such criteria that he wrote his Criticism of Political Economy, of which the first instalment was published at Berlin in 1859.

The most notable portion of this work is the preface, which contains the first statement of the theory of historical materialism. The relationships of men in social life, says Marx, are determined by the conditions of production, are necessary relationships independent of the individual will; these determined relationships constitute the real foundation upon which is erected the legislative, political, moral, and religious superstructure of every age. The relationships of production, or the economic relationships prevailing at a given period, are a natural and necessary outcome of the method of production, or rather of the historic phase of the instrument of production. But sooner or later the further development of the productive forces generates a new configuration in technical method, a configuration incompatible with the prevailing relationships of production, those correlative to the productive order hitherto dominant. There then occurs an explosion, a social revolution, which disintegrates economic relationships, and, by ricochet, disintegrates existing social relationships, replacing them by better economic relationships, adequate to the new and more highly evolved phase of the productive instrument.

In broad outline it may be said that economic evolution has exhibited four progressive phases; the Asiatic economy, the classical economy, the feudalist economy, and the modern bourgeois or capitalist economy. The evolution of the productive instrument, never arrested in its secular march, will in due course renew the eternally recurrent opposition between the method of production and the relationships of production, rendering these incompatible. Once more will come an explosion, the last of the great social convulsions, whereby the bourgeois economic order will be overthrown and will be replaced by the co-operative commonwealth. This new development will close the primary epoch of the history of human society.

But the work we are discussing is further noteworthy inasmuch as it reflects a special phase of our author's thought, a thought which never ceased to exhibit a struggle between opposing trends and was ever oppressed by their contrast. The book, in fact, shows Marx continually involved in antiquated Hegelian machinery, or proceeding through a chain of categories evolving one from another—capital, landed property, the wage system, the state, foreign commerce, the world market. From each of these categories we may infer how the process of their successive development is accomplished. We are led to infer that the wage system is the outcome of landed proprietorship, for the expropriation of the peasant proprietors produces the proletarianised masses offering labour power for sale; and we are led to infer that the constitution of the world market is the crown and the epilogue of modern capitalist economy. In fact, according to Marx, the historic mission of capitalism based upon wage labour, whose origins go back to the sixteenth century, is the creation of the world market. The world market is now devoted to the colonisation of California and Australia and to the opening of trading ports in China and Japan; its creation marks the climax of capitalism's historic mission, and indicates the approaching end of the economic form which was destined to fulfill it.

Now these ideas, in themselves arbitrary and fantastic, show how Marx's thought at that epoch was still in an undecided or amphibious phase, in which the torrid sun of British economic science had not as yet succeeded in totally dispelling the fogs of German philosophy. But another incompatibility lessens the value of the book or diminishes its doctrinal efficacy; for Marx, at this stage of his studies, invariably gave to the history of doctrine too preponderant a place, introducing it insistently into the course of his own exposition, which was thus deprived of continuity and weakened in force.

Further, the book we are considering did not directly bear upon any of the social questions which strongly arouse public interest, but was restricted to the study of two theories whose importance at first sight seems purely academic, the theory of value and the theory of money.

Marx contended that the value of commodities is exclusively determined by the quantity of labour incorporated into them; he traced the affiliations of this thesis with the work of its first enunciators in Italy and in England; but he did not offer any reasoned demonstration of its truth. On the contrary, he frankly recognised that this contention is full of contradictions alike theoretical and practical, contradictions that appear insoluble; but he promised to vanquish them in the subsequent course of his exposition.

Far more noteworthy is the chapter on money, for it contains a masterly criticism of the quantitative theory of Ricardo, and an effective refutation of the "labour notes" idea of Bray, Gray, Proudhon, and others. According to this plan, every producer performing a certain quantum of labour would receive from the state a voucher entitling him to obtain from other producers the result of an equal quantum of labour; but the suggestion implies complete ignorance of the intrinsic conditions of the individualistic economy, wherein each producer creates an object without any certainty that there will be a market for it, or that it represents a real utility and will fetch a definite price. It obviously follows that the producer cannot be sure that he will be able to sell the article which he has produced, or that he will be able to transform it into anything with universal purchasing power; the product has to be baptised or sanctioned by the market, which alone has power to stamp it as useful by purchasing it.

Now the "labour note" system claims that it can forcibly dispense with the market by supplying to the producer of an article whose utility and saleable value has not been recognised by the market, a universally available purchasing power. The practical outcome of this forcible method is that the producer of a useless article can by means of his "labour note" secure for himself a useful article, whereas the producer of this latter will not in turn be able to exchange his own "labour note" for any object possessing utility; that is to say, the article made by the first producer will find no purchaser, and the "labour note" of the second producer will effect no purchase. This is inevitable, for the proposed reform is inconsistent, eclectic, and incomplete, since it pretends to socialise exchange while maintaining production and distribution upon their old individualistic basis, and overlooks the incongruity of any such supposition.

The "labour note" system cannot rationally be instituted until production has been socialised, or until the state shall impose upon each individual the production of a specified quantity and quality of commodities, correlatively imposing upon the consumer the obligation to acquire these. In such conditions, however, we could no longer speak of commodities or of exchange, for these phenomena belong exclusively to an individualistic economy and would have no place in a socialised economy. This means that the reform of exchange by the suppression of profit can only be effected by the suppression of exchange itself, by the institution of the co-operative commonwealth. Indeed, Robert Owen, who proposed the "labour note" system in 1832, and was the most brilliant of its advocates, clearly recognised this difficulty, and understood that the socialisation of production would be an indispensable preliminary to the adoption of the plan. It was the impatience of his disciples which forced him to inaugurate the system within the framework of the capitalist economy by founding the National Equitable Labour Exchange. The logic of facts gave a patent demonstration of the irrationality of the attempt; and Owen, saddened and humiliated, was compelled to witness the failure of the new institution.

It will readily be understood that these abstruse and abstract investigations, devoid as they are of any tangible connection with the burning problems of property, were not likely to arouse interest among the members of the party. Nothing could be more natural than the tone of hopeless discouragement with which the volume was greeted even by the author's most devoted friends. Liebknecht, for example, declared that he had never before experienced so great a disappointment. Biskamp enquired what on earth it was all about; Burgers deplored that Marx should have published a work so dull and fragmentary. It is true that the book had a moderate sale; Rau quoted it in his treatise; certain Russian and American economists made it the subject of profound studies. Nevertheless, the publisher refused to proceed with the issue.

Hardly had this literary bickering come to an end when Marx became involved in a violent quarrel with the distinguished naturalist Karl Vogt, who publicly charged him with setting snares for the German exiles and with having sordid relationships with the police. Marx replied with a savage booklet entitled Herr Vogt (London, 1860). The style of this polemic writing is intolerably vulgar; but in other respects the book is noteworthy, for it contains interesting revelations anent the Italian campaign and the relationships between Turin and the Tuileries. We must remember, moreover, that the accusation here launched against Vogt, that he was in the pay of the Second Empire, was subsequently confirmed beyond dispute, for in 1871 among the ruins of the Tuileries there was found a receipt for frs. 40,000 which had been paid over to Vogt.

But scientific failures, personal contests, persistent and distressing domestic discomforts, seemed to inspire our athlete with renewed strength for the continuance of the work he had begun. Nevertheless, profiting by experience, he decided upon a yet further modification in the plan of his book, resolving to defer to its final section all historico-critical disquisitions, and to concentrate his energies upon the positive analysis of concrete reality. Further, being prevented by frequent illness from tackling the more difficult themes of pure economics, he devoted these long intervals of comparative leisure to statistical investigations and to the perusal of factory inspectors' reports, of white books and of blue books, and he plunged into the study of the economic history of Great Britain, so that it became possible for him to interleave the pages of abstract theory, necessarily difficult to understand, with pages that are really living, pages that vibrate with the reflex of reality. At length, abandoning the method he had previously followed of publishing fragmentary essays, he decided to rewrite the work throughout before sending it to press.

After several years of incredible labour, the days being devoted to reading in the British Museum library, and the nights (for he often went on writing until four in the morning) to literary composition; falling again and again beneath the burden of his cross, but ever rising to his feet once more, thanks to the demon within urging him on and thanks also to the sustaining hand of his incomparable friend; he at length completed his task, and in the spring of 1867 sailed for Hamburg with the manuscript of the first volume of Capital, which he entrusted to Meissner for publication. In Hamburg he passed pleasant days with Dr. Kugelmann, a friend and fervent admirer, and with various officials, generals, and bankers; he was visited by a lawyer named Warnebold, an emissary from Bismarck, who, acting on the minister's instructions, exhorted him "to employ his brilliant talents for the advantage of the German people." Before long, however, he returned to London, where he earnestly devoted himself to giving the last touches to his book, which was finally issued from the press in the autumn of the same year.

Thus was at length given to the world the monumental work destined to revolutionise sociological thought, and to give a new and higher trend, not to socialism alone, but to political economy itself. To sum up its drift very briefly, we may say that the argument follows three chief lines, value, machinery, and primitive accumulation. He set out from the fundamental principle (a principle which the philosopher Krause had declared to be as important to political economy as the fall of heavy bodies is important to physics) that the value of products is measured by the mass of labour incorporated into them, and drew the conclusion that the profit of capital is nothing other than the materialisation of a quantity of labour expended by the worker, and is in other words unpaid labour, stolen and usurped income. The worker, that is to say, transmits into the product a value equal to the quantity of labour incorporated therein, but receives from the capitalist a value less than this, a value equal to the quantity of labour embodied in the commodities necessary to reproduce the energy expended by the worker.

Now the difference between the value of the product (that is to say the quantity of labour transmitted by the worker into the product) and the value of the labour power (that is to say the quantity of labour employed in producing the commodities consumed by the worker) constitute the surplus value which is gratuitously pocketed by the owner of the means of production in virtue of the fact that he is owner. In this way Marx attains to the qualitative notion of the income of capital, or explains whereof that income effectively consists. It remains to determine the quantity of income, which cannot be specified unless there have previously been precisely determined the measure and the figure of wages.

Now though it be true that the growth of accumulation virtually tends to bring about an increase in the amount paid in wages, it is nevertheless within the power of the capitalist to obviate this undesirable event by investing the growing accumulation in the form of technical capital, which by its very nature is without influence upon wages. But the capitalist can do more than this. He can transform into technical capital a part of the capital which has hitherto been utilised in paying wages, thus throwing some of the workers out of employment, or creating an industrial reserve army. This reserve army, on the one hand stifles all resistance on the part of the workers in active employment, keeping their wages at a level which will purchase the barest necessaries, and on the other hand permits to capitalist industry the sudden expansions in times of prosperity which to the capitalist are so desirable and so profitable.

Thus Marx's qualitative investigation is succeeded by a quantitative investigation, so that we learn, not only what surplus value is, but that it is equal to all the excess over and above the more or less limited subsistence of the worker, and that the worker is not merely defrauded of part of the value resulting from his labour, but is reduced to a wretched pittance, happy if he can secure this, and if he be not condemned by the hopeless entanglements of capitalist relationships to submergence in the backwater of the most terrible poverty. The result is that to the favoured recipients of surplus value there is subject a brutalised crowd reduced to a narrow wage, while at a yet lower level there struggles in the morass the amorphous mass of those who are condemned to labour without end.

We thus realise, adds Marx, how profit is born of capital and is in its turn transformed into capital. But none of the considerations hitherto adduced suffice to make it clear what was the origin of primitive capital, that which first of all gave birth to profit, and consequently cannot be the product of profit. The celebrated section on the secret of primitive accumulation was intended to solve this problem. Classical political economy, said Marx, regarded the formation of primitive capital as an episode which occurred during the first days of creation. In times long gone by, there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent, and above all frugal Élite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living. Thus it came to pass before long that the former became impoverished whilst the latter grew wealthy, and the wealthy earned the gratitude of the poor by hiring these to work for them in return for a paltry wage. The theological legend of original sin tells us how man came to be condemned to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow; but the economic history of original sin reveals to us that there are people to whom this is by no means essential. We learn that one section of humanity has succeeded in eluding the divine judgment and in procuring for itself bread and cakes by the sweat of others.

Unfortunately, continues Marx, a conscientious questioning of history discloses that primitive capital originated in very various ways, of a character anything but idyllic. Until the close of the fifteenth century there existed in England a race of peasant proprietors, nominally subject to the jurisdiction of the great lords of the soil. But the increasing demand for wool which resulted from the expansion of the Flemish wool industry, and the increasing demand for flesh meat consequent upon the growth of population, induced the great landowners to destroy an agrarian system by which their returns from rent were rendered practically nil. The free cultivators were brutally evicted from the fields which their ancestors had arduously tilled for centuries past, to be replaced by shepherds and flocks, the crowds of the expropriated hastening to the towns to offer the strength of their arms for hire.

Here they happened upon a rout of usurers, traders, house-owners, enriched craftsmen, and lucky speculators; and here too were those who had expropriated them, the landowners who had heaped up savings by fair means or foul, but had hitherto been unable to turn their savings to account owing to the restrictions imposed by the corporative economy (guild system). These accepted as a gift from heaven the influx of the proletarian multitude, and were not slow in setting the newcomers to work on behalf of the growing manufactures. Modern capitalist industry thus originated in a terrible expropriation of the working population which transformed the independent peasants into an impoverished and hunger-stricken mob. But historic nemesis awaits this society conceived in theft, and Marx predicts its disastrous end in the ominous words: "The knell of capitalist property will sound; the expropriators will be expropriated."

The fulfilment of the process will be effected by the forces inherent in the mechanism of the capitalist economy. The more extensive the development of that economy, the fiercer becomes the internecine struggle between the individual aggregations of capital, the more extensive become the accumulations of wealth in the hands of capitalists of the upper stratum, and the smaller becomes the number of these; correlatively there takes place an increase in the size of the working and poverty-stricken crowd, the more hopeless and more pitiful becomes its degradation, whilst simultaneously its cohesion grows more compact, for the workers are disciplined and organised by the very process which associates labour in the factory and upon the land. At a given moment, when the number of mammoth capitalists has conspicuously diminished, and when the pullulating mass of proletarians has increased to an immeasurable degree and has been forced down into the most abject poverty, it will at length be easy to the dispossessed to expropriate the small group of usurpers.

Thus the expropriation of the masses by the few, which greeted the dawn of the contemporary economic order, will be counterposed by the expropriation of the restricted number of masters at the hands of the proletarian masses, and this will triumphantly herald a calmer and more resplendent sunrise.