3i6 
SOCIALISM IN ENGLAND. 
perfectly true, but it is misleading, to say the least, to affirm 
that machinery adds nothing to value. In the first place, 
wherever there is a monopoly—and quite apart from patents 
and combinations, the sagacious and enterprising employer, by 
always adopting the most improved machinery, will have 
advantages in the nature of a monopoly—machines do add to 
exchange-value ; and secondly, the important thing to consider 
is the use-value, the utilities created by the machines, to which, 
indeed, modern civilization owes most of its increased wealth. 
While it is true that manual labourers have not shared to the 
extent one would wish in the increased produce due to 
machinery, it is not true that they do not share in it at all. 
They benefit by the cheapening of articles of their consump 
tion, and it is not the case that wages are necessarily lowered 
in proportion. On the contrary, as we have seen, money- 
wages have largely increased in the last fifty years, while this 
cheapening process has been going on. 
It is unnecessary to criticise Mr. Hyndman’s theories 
further. M. de Laveleye has already dealt with them by 
anticipation. But, however false Mr. Hyndman’s analysis may 
be, however exaggerated his picture of the present, however 
incorrect his estimate of the future, after making all allowances 
the fact still remains that our present industrial system is far 
from perfect. There is a growing dissatisfaction, not confined 
to the poor and the Social Democrats alone, with the present 
distribution of wealth ; an increasing conviction that the 
manual labourers do not obtain the share to which they are 
justly entitled in the wealth which they help to produce ; an 
ever-deepening belief, not merely that the profits of the 
employer are sometimes inordinately high and the wages of 
the labourer often disgracefully low, but that the present 
system, which seems inevitably to breed antagonism between 
employer and employed, and which too often leaves the latter 
at the mercy of the former, is radically at fault. How to 
change this system for the better is really becoming a vital 
question. Let us see what answer the Social Democrats give. 
The objects of the Federation may be found most concisely 
stated in their manifesto, entitled “Socialism made Plain.”