Now this Economic Man was the embodiment of honest labor and rapacious greed. Out of the better quality, Karl Marx painted the picture of the faithful laborer in Coketown whose masters swindled him out of the “surplus value” he produced; out of the worse quality classical economists like Ricardo painted an equally entrancing picture of the beneficent capitalist, through whose foresight, organizing ability, and boldness business could be conducted on a scale a simpler age had scarcely dreamed of. It was out of these conceptions, as they were elaborated and rationalized in books like Porter’s Progress of the Nineteenth Century and Marx’s Capital, that there grew up the notion that the only fundamental problem in the modern world was the labor problem--the problem as to who should control industry, who should profit by its advances, and who should own the complicated instruments by which it was conducted. Our business here is not to examine the various programs that were offered during the last century in answer to these problems; merely to catalog them with the barest explanation of their purpose would be an imposing task, were it not for the fact that it has been neatly done for us by Mr. Savel Zimand. It is enough to see here the common element in capitalism, copartnery, State Socialism, Guild Socialism, Co-operation, Communism, Syndicalism, the One Big Union, Trades Unionism, and the like; whether these movements represent actual facts, like capitalism, copartnery, or trades unionism, or whether they are simply projections, like Syndicalism and the One Big Union. If our excursion through the classic utopias has been of any use, it must have shown us how pathetic is this notion that the key to a good society rests simply on the ownership and control of the industrial plant of the community. Is it any less absurd when we confess that most of the movements which were founded upon this assumption were actuated by generous and humane motives, and that Francis Place, the tailor of Charing Cross, who believed in a radical application of laissez faire principles, was just as sincere a believer in the common weal as Karl Marx, who predicted a dictatorship of the proletariat? If a great many of these programs have had the notion that industrial machinery, under socialism or guildism or co-operation was to be used for the common benefit, what was lacking was any common notion as to what the common benefit was.