impartiality. Their preconceptions emerge rather in the
problems which they chose to study and the assumptions
on which they worked than in overt political doctrine.

Since they believed themselves to be in search of
eternal principles they paid little attention to the special
historical features of actual situations, and, in particular,
they were apt to project the economics of a community
of small equal proprietors into the analysis of advanced
capitalism. Thus the orthodox conception of competition
entails that each commodity in each market is supplied by
a large number of producers, acting individualistically,
bound together neither by open collusion nor by uncon-
scious class loyalty; and entails that any individual is free
to enter any line of activity he pleases. And the laws de-
rived from such a society are applied to modern industry
and finance.

Again, the orthodox conception of wages tending to
equal the marginal disutility of labour, which has its origin
in the picture of a peasant farmer leaning on his hoe in the
evening and deciding whether the extra product of another
hour's work will repay the extra backache, is projected into
the modern labour market, where the individual worker
has no opportunity to decide anything except whether it is
better to work or to starve.

The orthodox economists have been much preoccupied
with elegant elaborations of minor problems, which dis-
tract the attention of their pupils from the uncongenial
realities of the modern world, and the development of
abstract argument has run far ahead of any possibility of
empirical verification. Marx's intellectual tools are far
cruder, but his sense of reality is far stronger, and his argu-
ment towers above their intricate constructions in rough
and gloomy grandeur.

He sees the capitalist system as fulfilling a historic

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