tion and reduce the condition of the workingmen to their former level. In this they succeed only partly, for when the workingmen have reached a higher level of well-being they utilize it to strengthen their organization, obtain more knowledge and intelligence, and the spirit of revolt is aroused in them long before the former low level of their estate is reached. Their resistance is intensified, and the fight on their part does not slacken until they reach not only the high level which they formerly occupied but until they make new conquests, placing themselves on heights never yet before reached. This they are enabled to do because the spirit of revolt which is aroused in them by the pressure of economic tendencies succeeds in constantly limiting and checking the economic process and diverting it from its natural course. So that "the social evolution moves in a wave-like course, which has this peculiarity: No matter what relation the hill and dale may have to each other, the crest of each succeeding wave reaches, as a rule, a higher level than any preceding one." The waves will finally run so high that their crests will reach into socialism: the prospect of a social revolution is successfully banished.
The whole thing sounds so plausible, the argument so much Marxian, and the picture of the rising waves is so beautiful, that one is almost tempted to overlook the fact that there is absolutely no warrant in the whole argument for the assumption so unceremoniously made that the spirit of revolt engendered in the working class by the hardships and misery of capitalistic accumulation succeeds in constantly limiting and checking the economic process while the capitalist system lasts. And yet it is on this assumption that the whole thing rests! With this assumption out, the whole argument against the social revolution as Marx conceived it, with bursting of shell and all, falls to the ground. We are not disposed to quarrel with the author of the "sociological wave" in so far as the same does not put forward any higher pretensions than to give us a descrip-
