The last thing men contrive to discern in every question is the familiar obvious, and it came as a great and shattering discovery to the economic and sociological thought of the latter half of the nineteenth century that there was going on not simply a production but an immense concentration of wealth, a differentiation of a special wealthy class of landholder and capitalist, a diminution of small property owners and the development of a great and growing class of landless, nearly propertyless men, the _proletariat_. Marx showed--he showed so clearly that to-day it is recognized by every intelligent man--that _given a continuance of our industrial and commercial system_, of uncontrolled gain seeking, that is, given a continuance of our present spirit and ideas of property, there must necessarily come a time when the owner and the proletarian will stand face to face, with nothing--if we except a middle class of educated professionals dependent on the wealthy, who are after all no more than the upper stratum of the proletariat--to mask or mitigate their opposition. We shall have two classes, the class-conscious worker and the class-conscious owner, and they will be at war. And with a broad intellectual sweep he flung the light of this conception upon the whole contemporary history of mankind. _Das Kapital_ was no sketch of Utopias, had no limitation to the conditions or possibilities of this country or that. "Here," he says, in the widest way, "is what is going on all over the world. So long as practically untrammelled private property, such as you conceive it to-day, endures, this must go on. The worker gravitates steadily everywhere to a bare subsistence, the rest of the proceeds of his labour swell the power of the owners. So it will go on while gain and getting are the rule of your system, until accumulated tensions between class and class smash this present social organization and inaugurate a new age."