In the heat of political appeal which of these two moods will prove the better vote getter?
If Mr. Wells himself before an audience were tilting with an adversary more "advanced" than he, what chances would his negative "advisability" get in the decision? First to deny the right to compensation and then with skittish half-heartedness, to talk about its "probable" advisability is to make easy work for the answering opponent.
More strictly of the Marx tradition, it is doubtful if any living writer carries more weight than Karl Kautsky. In the second part of The Social Revolution he is very explicit: "The money capitalist fulfills no personal function in the social life, and can without difficulty be at once expropriated. This will be all the more readily done as it is this portion of the capitalist class, the financier, who is most superfluous, and who is continually usurping domination over the whole economic life." The word "capitalist" is here used with precision as the receiver of interest. Like the landowner, as distinct from the working farmer, he is here held to be a parasite living off the laborer and has the same excuse for being as any other dead-beat. Why, then, should those holding such views consent to indemnify mere idlers? In the tug of politics, every extremist will show what real indemnity means. It means a huge issue of bonds thrown, as an interest-bearing debt, upon the people. Having been thoroughly instructed by socialism, that interest to private persons is theft, will they take kindly to this self-imposed burden, even if only during the life of the bondholder?
