The agitator will tell you--what you already know--that there is a part of the product of your toil that goes to your employer. This should not surprise you. When you consented to work for three dollars a day, it was with a clear understanding that you would do enough more than three dollars’ worth of work a day to give your employer a fair return upon his investment. I’ll wager, you never suspected that he had no right to this share, but, instead, was stealing it from you, until the soap-box orator began to tell you that you were being “robbed.” If you question the speaker as to the extent of this “robbery,” you will get little satisfaction. Socialists all agree that the worker is “robbed,” but they disagree very materially as to the amount of which he is “robbed.” One Socialist (I. L. P. pamphlet, “Simple Division”) tells you that the worker receives only _one-seventh_ of what he produces. Another (Hazell, “A Summary of Marx’s ‘Capital’”) asserts that labor obtains _one-fifth_ of its product. Still another (Victor Grayson, Speech, June 4, 1908) announces that the worker takes _one-quarter_ of what he really earns. Another English Socialist (author of “The Basis and Policy of Socialism”) proves by statistics that _one-third_ of the total product goes to the man who ought to have it all. A more reasonable individual (Chiozza-Money, “Riches and Poverty”) estimates the worker’s share as a “_trifle more than one-half_,” while Suthers, who makes a specialty of answering objections to Socialism, figures that the returns to labor represent _two-thirds_ of the amount that the worker ought to receive (“Common Objections to Socialism Answered”). You see what a hazy idea the Socialists have upon this question, how chaotic and self-contradictory their statements are; yet it is upon such “facts,” that the contentions or claims of Socialism depend. The soap-box man’s statements about the “robbery” of the worker are based upon a principle that is taken from Karl Marx’s book, “Capital,” which is the Bible of all real Socialists. Karl Marx said that “labor is the source of all value,” and it is upon the truth of this statement that the whole economic structure of Socialism rests. If it is true that labor _is_ the source of all value, it is possible to argue that the laborer is entitled to all he produces. If labor _is not_ the sole source of value, the laborer is not entitled to all he produces and it is nonsense to say that he is. Thus, the whole question of the fairness of the principle upon which the modern wage system is based stands or falls with this “law” of value.