The soap-box orator will talk to you by the hour about surplus value. He will tell you that it makes no difference how much money there is in your pay-envelope. So long as it does not contain every cent of your employer’s profit, you are being “robbed.” “No wage can ever be fair compensation for a day’s work!” he shouts. “Before there can be justice on earth, the making of goods for profit must come to an end, for this is the ‘tap-root’ from which all the evils of Society develop. No dividends! No Interest! No Rents! No Profits! In a word, no Surplus Value!” Marx, like the soap-boxer on the corner, includes all profits in the category of robbery and exploitation. He admits that labor can do nothing without capital, but he contends that capital itself is the product of past labor and, therefore, ought rightfully to belong to the laborers of the present day. “Capital,” he says, “is dead labor, that, vampire-like, lives by sucking living labor” (“Capital,” p. 134). In this we have the assumption that all labor is performed by “laborers” of the propertyless class, and that all capital is owned by “capitalists.” This, as you know, is not true. There are plenty of laborers who have a respectable little store of capital laid by for the proverbial rainy day, and many of them own stock in the very concern that employs them. Not every man who lives by the labor of his hands is existing on the verge of starvation, as Socialists would have you believe, nor is it true that all labor is performed by the “laboring class.” Many so-called “capitalists” are truly sons of toil, the performers of manual labor and the producers of wealth, even as Marx would define a “producer.” But, let us stop generalizing, and get down to cases. Marx says that all profit is robbery and exploitation. As an example of the utter absurdity of this theory, let me cite an illustration which Mr. G. W. de Tunzelmann once used in a debate with a prominent English Socialist. He took the case of a man who buys a diamond for $498,000. The man pays $2,000 to the diamond-cutter for cutting the stone, and, finally, sells it for $550,000, making a 10 per cent. profit upon his outlay. If Marx argues rightly, this sum of $50,000 was obtained by robbery, but--who was robbed? Was it the diamond-cutter who was defrauded of a portion of his wages? Should the entire $52,000 have gone to him for his part in the transaction, while the capitalist got nothing? The Socialist who was debating with Mr. de Tunzelmann found it impossible to answer this question intelligibly. “If the $50,000 did not come from the diamond-cutter’s wages, where did it come from?” was all he could say, and, John, it is all that any Socialist can say! Then, here is an illustration from my own experience: