up, the ideal city to which the feet of men seeking a rational life and a moral community must always wander.
4. Comfort.
Nor is this intellectual appeal confined to what are called the intellectual classes.
Marx, taking an all too narrow stand on the economic determinism of history, was compelled to lay down the law of increasing misery as the law of Socialism. The rich were to get richer and the poor poorer. Wealth was to gather in the hands of a very few and misery was to become general. Then the change was to come. There is far more in the Marxian forecast than appears in the experience of the last two or three generations. It was unfortunate in its moment of publication. The eighteenth and early nineteenth century writers who also believed in it, were justified by events far more than Marx, For the workers were then going down into very shadowy paths. But in Marx’s time a vast expansion of commerce was imminent. Never had commerce leaped forward with such bounds as it did in the middle of the nineteenth century, and the working classes shared in the general increase in wealth. Engels described the black cloud which overhung the working classes just at the moment when some rays of light were penetrating it. Marx said that Socialism would come because misery would increase; as a matter of fact Socialism spread whilst misery was being lightened.
