Mr. Spargo asks us to accept these figures as true because Mr. Sanial, “an expert statistician,” says that they are authentic. Don’t let him fool you, John. Mr. Sanial simply “guesses” that his statistics are reliable, and, as he is a “red card” Socialist, he must either tell us just where he got his authority for these figures or be ruled out of court as a prejudiced “guesser.” And he can’t do it. He can’t do it, simply because there are no census records, or other official figures, upon which to base his statistics on wealth distribution between the classes, no accurate information upon this subject within the reach of any human being. Yet it is upon such “evidence” that Socialists rely to prove that Marx was a true prophet! But this is an old trick. As Stuart P. West says (_The Common Cause_, June, 1912), “the Socialist of the agitator-demagogue type has no fine sensibilities about making his statements square with painstaking inquiries into the truth. He makes broad assertions, backing them up with a few statistics which are partly guess-work, partly half-truths, and relies upon the lack of information among his audience to do the rest.” So much for the unreliable character of Socialist figures in general. Now, let us get down to facts. The Erfurt platform (1891) repeated Marx’s assertion that among the workers there is a “growing insecurity of existence, misery, oppression, slavery, degradation and exploitation.” If you thought that this might be true, John, what would you expect to find? That the worker was being pressed closer to the wall, would you not? That wages increased slowly, so slowly as scarcely to approximate the bare cost of subsistence; that there was a more rapid extension of the hours of labor, with pauperism a general rather than an exceptional condition. Let us see. In the United States, wages have practically doubled since 1860 and the hours of labor have decreased from 15 to 30 per cent. In Norway, Sweden, Germany, Japan, and several other countries, the increase in wages since 1860 has also been fully (where not more than) 100 per cent, while the hours of labor, especially since 1890, have shown a tendency toward improvement consistent with such progress in the United States (cf. _The Common Cause_, loc. cit.). The statistics on pauperism afford quite as telling an argument against Marx’s prediction of the increasing misery. In the United States, in 1886, the ratio of paupers was 116.6 to each one hundred thousand inhabitants. In 1903 the ratio had decreased to 101.4 per each one hundred thousand inhabitants. In England the figures are even more impressive, for the ratio of paupers fell from 62.7 per one thousand inhabitants in 1849 to 26.2 in 1905. As Mr. West says: “There were actually 200,000 fewer paupers in 1905 than in 1849, although the population of the country during these fifty-six years almost doubled, and this in the face of the Marxian predictions.”