I have a friend who bought a painting from a young artist, paying $300 for it. This was a very fair price to pay for the picture. The artist was well satisfied with his bargain and my friend felt that the work of art was well worth $300 to him. Several years passed, and the comparatively obscure artist became a famous artist--so famous that there were lots of people who wanted to buy his pictures, and my friend found that he could sell his painting and get $2,000 for it. May we again ask: Who was robbed? The man who painted the picture received its full value at the time; the man who bought the picture from my friend was satisfied that he got good value for his money. If Marx is right, my friend robbed somebody to the extent of $1,700. But whom did he rob? As we have already seen, the value of an article is chiefly a matter of utility as adfected (raised or lowered) by difficulty of attainment--not the worker’s “difficulty of attainment,” not the time and effort he had to expend to produce this article, but your “difficulty of attainment,” or the effort you must make to secure it. The part that the worker plays in the production of a commodity is of minor importance when compared with the other factors which operate in determining its value. It is the employer, and not the worker, who assumes all the risk. It is the directing genius, and not the mere physical force used in operating the industry, that determines whether it shall succeed or fail. If this were not true, every business enterprise would be a success, for it would be nothing more than the proposition of getting money and men together and setting them to work. But you know that this is not what happens in real life. Mr. Hyndman, the celebrated English Socialist, attempts to say that such a thing is possible. In his manual of Socialism he asks us to believe that a man who has $50,000 would find it a very simple matter to live permanently by robbing other men of part of the products of their labor. This man, he tells us, merely buys a mill of some kind--_doesn’t it matter what kind of a mill he buys?_--employs a manager and the necessary number of operatives, and then sits down and lets the wheels go round. Don’t smile, John, for this is precisely what Mr. Hyndman tells us the man does. “He has nothing to do but sit still and watch the mill go,” he asserts, naively (see Mallock’s “Socialism,” p. 13).