plainly based on false premises. To mention only one point: In estimating the cost of living the learned statistician based his conclusions on the prices of certain staples. It is notorious, however, that these staples form only a small part of the cost of living. In New York, for instance, from one-quarter to one-third of the cost of living is paid as rent. Rent has increased tremendously in New York during that period. And yet the increase of rent is not included by the learned statistician. Yet such intentional deceptions are of little importance when compared with the unintentional deceptions, owing to the deceptiveness of the facts themselves. The comparative welfare of the working population of a country is usually measured by the wages paid, where the cost of living is the same. But the height of his wages are by no means an index to a workingman's prosperity.
I shall not go into this question, however, now, for the reason that, as the careful reader has undoubtedly observed, Marx does not speak of the growth of the poverty of the working class. The omission of any reference to poverty is very significant in so careful a writer as Marx. This alone would be sufficient warrant for us in assuming that Marx did not consider the growing poverty of the working class a necessary result of the evolution of capitalism, all revisionist assertions to the contrary notwithstanding. But Marx did not leave any room for speculation on the subject, for in another place in Capital he states clearly and explicitly what he summarized here in a short sentence. He says there:
"The law by which a constantly increasing quantity of means of production, thanks to the advance in the productiveness of social labor, may be set in movement by a progressively diminishing expenditure of human power, this law, in a capitalist society—where the laborer does not employ the means of production, but the means of production employ the laborer—undergoes a complete inversion and is expressed thus: the higher the productiveness of labor, the greater is the pressure of the laborers on the means of employment, the more precarious, there-
