In the combination of learning, philosophic acumen, and literary power, he is second to no economic thinker of the nineteenth century. He seems to have been master of the whole range of economic literature, and wielded it with a logical skill not less masterly. But his great strength lay in his knowledge of the technical and economic development of modern industry, and in his marvellous insight into the tendencies in social evolution determined by the technical and economic factors. Whether his theories in this department are right or wrong, they have suggested questions that will demand the attention of economic thinkers for a long time to come. It is in this department, and not in his theory of surplus value, that Marx’s significance as a scientific economist is to be found. Notwithstanding all that may justly be said in criticism of Marx, it remains, then, that his main achievement consists in the work he has done as scientific inquirer into the economic movement of modern times, as the philosophic historian of the capitalistic era. It is now admitted by all inquirers worthy of the name that history, including economic history, is a succession of orderly phenomena, that each phase in the line of succession is marked by facts and tendencies more or less peculiar to itself, and that laws and principles which we now condemn had formerly an historical necessity, justification, and validity. In accordance with this fundamental principle of historical evolution, arrangements and institutions which were once necessary, and originally formed a stage in human progress, may gradually develop contradictions and abuses, and thus become more or less antiquated. The economic, social, and political forms which were the progressive and even adequate expressions of the life of one era, become hindrances and fetters to the life of the succeeding times. This, the school of Karl Marx says, is precisely the condition of the present economic order. The existing arrangements of landlord, capitalist, and wage-labourer under free competition are burdened with contradiction and abuse. The life of society is being strangled by the forms which once promoted it. They maintain that the really vital and powerful tendencies of our time are towards a higher and wider form of social and economic organisation—towards socialism. Here, as we believe, is the central point of the whole question. The place of Marx in history will depend on how far he has made a permanent contribution towards the settlement of it.