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THE BIRTH OF MODERN SOCIALISM 143
associated with him were horrified at what they thought
was his cynical indifference to such glorious visions as
liberty, fraternity, and equality. Like Darwin, Marx
was always an earnest seeker of facts and forces. He
was laying the foundations of a scientific socialism and
dissecting the anatomy of capitalism in pursuit of the
laws of social evolution. The gigantic intellectual labors
of Marx from 1850 to 1870 are to-day receiving
due attention, and, while one after another of the later
economists has been forced reluctantly to acknowledge
his genius, few now will take issue with Professor Albion
W. Small when he says, "I confidently predict that
in the ultimate judgment of history Marx will have a
place in social science analogous with that of Galileo
in physical science." (19) In exile, and often desperate
poverty, Marx worked out with infinite care the
scientific basis of the generalization
— first given to the
world in the Communist Manifesto— that social and political
institutions are the product of economic forces.
In all periods there have been antagonistic economic
classes whose relative power is determined by struggles
between them. "Freedman and slave," he says, "patrician
and plebeian, lord and serf, guild master and journeyman,
in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant
opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted,
now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each
time ended either in a revolutionary reconstruction of
society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending
classes." (20) Here is a summary of that conflict which
Professor Small declares "is to the social process what
friction is to mechanics." (21) It may well be that "the
fact of class struggle is as axiomatic to-day as the fact
of gravitation," (22) yet, when Marx first elaborated his
theory, it
was not only a revolutionary doctrine among