Note 18 — Chapter XII

I met an interesting embodiment of this mood of mind in America, in the person of a slim young man, well-dressed, well-educated, refined in his speech and manners, who worked as a clerk or accountant in some large financial house. To my great astonishment he introduced himself to me as a socialist. "I don't believe like Marx," he said, "that labour produces everything, but I maintain that the task-work of the employed and directed labourer, of whatever grade—whether he uses a pen or a chisel—is always worth more than the wages which the employers pay him for performing it. I feel this myself with regard to my own firm. Month by month I am worth to it more than the sums it gives me. This," he went on, with an odd gleam in his eyes, "is what I may not endure to think of—that others should be always appropriating values which I have produced myself; and nine out of ten of the men who become socialists, do so because they feel as I do about this particular point."