ditions of capitalist society which would suggest the possibility of the inauguration of the socialist system by purely mechanical agencies. Quite to the contrary: as far as the purely mechanical breakdown of capitalism is concerned, as has been fully explained in the text, it is not a physical breakdown, as would be necessary in order to exclude the necessary intervention of conscious human activity, but rather a moral bankruptcy. Certainly, there is absolutely nothing in the capitalist system to prevent it from relapsing into a sort of new feudalism or slavery, with the collective ownership of the means of production by an aristocracy of the capitalist class, instead of developing into a socialist-democratic system.
But not only the transition from capitalism to socialism requires the active agency of conscious and purposeful human effort. The whole Marxian theory of the evolution of society through a series of class-struggles brought about by a conflict of conditions of production with social institutions is so conceived by Marx as to make the intervention of human effort for the amelioration of society an absolutely necessary and integral part of the "conflict." It is only necessary to remind the reader of the circumstance, pointed out in the text, that Marx does not speak of the revolutions as the result of the impossibility of continuing production under the old institutions, but of production being "fettered" by them, a condition implying a moral valuation and volition of an active human agent.
That the Marxian theory was so understood by his disciples, can hardly be doubted. The opinions of the best known among them on the subject of practical idealism, quoted by us above in the first appendix, proves that beyond the possibility of a doubt. We will therefore refer our readers to those expressions of opinion, in order to avoid unnecessary repetition, as to the authors there quoted, and will only add some expressions of opinion from the pen of Marx's great Russian disciple, George Plechanoff. We deem it of importance to offer this "cumulative evidence" of Plechanoff not only because of the great esteem in which his views are held among Marxists, but also because he is more circumstantial at this particular point than any one of the authors already quoted by us, and does not only show the mere fact that the Marxists admit the "individual factor" in history but also the limitations they place on it.
In the first place Plechanoff admits that there is some
