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