for his own doings, the very opposite is the case. The present system makes every man responsible for what he does not do. In consequence of the unprecedented interconnection of modern industry, the sum of conditions needed to be known for its successful guidance have so immensely increased that rational calculation is scarcely possible, and men are enriched without any merit, and impoverished without any fault. According to Lassalle, in the absence as yet of an adequate system of commercial statistics, the number of known conditions is always much smaller than the number of unknown, and the consequence is, that trade is very much a game of chance. Everything in modern industrial economy is ruled by social connections, by favourable or unfavourable situations and opportunities. _Conjunctur_ is its great Orphic chain. Chance is its Providence--Chance and his sole and equally blind counsellor, Speculation. Every age and condition of society, says Lassalle, tends to develop some phenomenon that more particularly expresses its type and spirit, and the purest type of capitalistic society is the financial speculator. Capital, he maintains, is a historical and not a logical category, and the capitalist is a modern product. He is the development, not of the ancient Croesus or the mediæval lord, but of the usurer, who has taken their place, but was in their lifetime hardly a respectable person. Croesus was a very rich man, but he was not a capitalist, for he could do anything with his wealth except capitalize it. The idea of money making money and of capital being self-productive, which Lassalle takes to be the governing idea of the present order of things, was, he says, quite foreign to earlier periods. Industry is now entirely under the control of capitalists speculating for profit. No one now makes things first of all for his own use--as mythologizing economists relate--and then exchanges what is over for the like redundant work of his neighbours. Men make everything first of all, and last of all, for other people's use, and they make it at the direction and expense of a capitalist who is speculating for money, and, in the absence of systematic statistics, is speculating in the dark. Chance and social connections make him rich, chance and social connections bring him to ruin. Capital is not the result of saving, it is the result of _Conjunctur_; and so are the vicissitudes and crises that have so immensely increased in modern times. What you have now, therefore, says Lassalle, is a system of socialism; wealth is at present distributed by social means, and by nothing else; and all he contends for is, as he says, to substitute a regulated and rational socialism for this anarchic and natural socialism that now exists.