These crises occur at periodic intervals, each one severer and more widespread than the preceding, until they now tend to become chronic and permanent, and the whole capitalistic world staggers under an atlantean weight of ill-distributed wealth. Thus the process goes on in obedience to its own inherent laws. Production is more and more concentrated in the hands of mammoth capitalists and colossal joint-stock companies, under which the proletariat are organised and drilled into vast industrial armies. But as crisis succeeds crisis, until panic, stagnation, and disorder are universal, it becomes clear that the _bourgeoisie_ are no longer capable of controlling the industrial world. In fact, the productive forces rise in chronic rebellion against the forms imposed on them by capitalism. The incompatibility between social production and anarchic distribution decidedly declares itself. A long course of hard experience has trained the modern democracy in the insight necessary for the appreciation of the conditions of its own existence. The social character of production is explicitly recognised. The proletariat seizes the political power, and through it at last takes complete control over the economic functions of society. It expropriates the private capitalist, and, appropriating the means of production, manages them in its own interest, which is the interest of society as a whole; society passes into the socialistic stage through a revolution determined by the natural laws of social evolution, and not by a merely arbitrary exercise of power. It is a result determined by the inherent laws of social evolution, independent of the will and purpose of individual men. All that the most powerful and clear-sighted intellect can do is to learn to divine the laws of the great movement of society, and to shorten and alleviate the birth-pangs of the new era. The efforts of reactionaries of every class to turn the wheel of history backwards are in vain. But an intelligent appreciation of its tendencies, and a willing co-operation with them, will make progress easier, smoother, and more rapid. We need hardly return to the _rôle_ which is played by surplus value in this vast historical process. The capitalist appropriates the product of labour because it contains surplus value. It is the part of the product that embodies surplus value and represents a clear gain which attracts him. Surplus value is the beginning, middle, and end of capitalism. It moves it alike in its origin and progress, decline and fall. It is the keynote of a great process of historic evolution continued for centuries; the secret of a vast development, which becomes more and more open as time goes on. And capitalism grows sick of the sustenance which formerly nourished it. It dies of over-repletion, of habitual excess in surplus value.