sad truth, that that much-abused worthy is not quite as all-powerful as some of his would-be admirers would have us believe, or, at any rate, that his influence is not quite as direct, and therefore does not work quite as smoothly, as they imagine. Besides, in his touching care for the Materialistic Conception of History, Struve has entirely forgotten the fact that, according to Marx, the economic conditions of the capitalist system are themselves a mass of contradictions, and could not therefore result in a smoothly working legal or political system.
It was evidently with the intention of eliminating some of the absurdities which the purely philosophic opponents of the Social Revolution had to resort to in their argument, that Rudolph Goldscheid constructed his theory of the so-called "Sociological Wave." This theory is quite cleverly constructed, and is evidently designed to present an argument against the possibility of the social revolution, without the use of some of the grosser errors of his predecessors. This theory recognizes most of the Marxian premises, and therefore sounds plausible. It consists in this:
The tendency of the accumulation of capital is, as Marx says, towards increasing the misery of the working-class. At the same time this accumulation has also the tendency to organize the working-class, as Marx has also clearly stated. This results in a struggle between organized labor and the capitalists, the class struggle on which Marx lays so much stress. In this struggle, the fortunes of war alternate, giving victory now to the one side and now to the other. When the tendency of capitalistic accumulation has gone very far in reducing the condition of the working-class, this engenders the revolutionary feeling of the proletariat, who put up a strenuous fight until they gain a victory substantially bettering their condition, usually putting them on a higher plane than they ever were before. This better condition lasts for some time until the capitalists, driven to it by the lash of competition, turn on the screws and attempt to enforce the tendency of capitalistic accumula-
