Let us be thankful for this concession! We shall in this respect, at least, be no worse off than we are to-day. At the present moment Jones can buy his art objects, and Smith his fast horses or his steam yacht, if the “resources” of Smith and Jones will permit. The question in which we are interested, John, is not what you and Jones _will be permitted_ to do, but what you _will be able_ to do, and I sadly fear that Spargo, who must know the logical effects of Socialism, had a good laugh at your expense when he penned those words. CHAPTER XI IS WRETCHEDNESS INCREASING? My dear John, If you listen to a Socialist speaker, or pick up a Socialist periodical, you are pretty certain to come face to face with the assertion that “the poor are now growing poorer and the rich richer every day.” If you ask for further particulars, you will soon discover that the chief reason why Socialists believe that this is what is happening is because Karl Marx predicted that it is what was going to happen. The great founder of Socialism was very certain that the development of capitalism would tend to produce constantly-increasing “wretchedness, oppression, slavery, degeneracy, and exploitation” of the working class (“Capital,” p. 790); and while a few writers, like Kirkup in the “History of Socialism” (p. 386), admit that “Marx made a serious mistake,” because “facts and reasonable expectations combine clearly to indicate that the democracy ... is marked by a growing intellectual, moral and political capacity, and by an _increasing freedom and prosperity_,” the great mass of Socialists agree with Snowden’s assertion (“The Socialist’s Budget,” p. 8) that “the few cannot be rich without making the many poor.” This principle, formulated by Marx, is known as “the law of the concentration of capital,” and, if we are to accept this formula, we must be able to prove that capital is being concentrated “in the hands of a smaller and smaller number of capitalists, that large fortunes are created at the expense of smaller fortunes, and that great capitalists are increased by the extinction of small ones” (Tcherkesoff, “Pages of Socialist History,” p. 23). In a few words, Marx insisted that capitalism was dividing the world into two classes--the owning class and the toiling class--and that the third, or middle class, was rapidly being eliminated, some few of its members being absorbed into the upper-class while the great majority, becoming impoverished, were destined to sink to the lowest of proletarian depths.