growth, and decline, something which no psychologico-individualistic motivation of social phenomena can do.
When Marx came to examine the economic structure of our social system, his problem consisted in finding answers to the following questions: What are the sources of our society's wealth, that is, of the means of subsistence and comfort of the individuals composing it? How and in what manner is it produced: what factors, circumstances and conditions are necessary for its production, preservation and accumulation? How, in what manner, and in accordance with what principles, is it divided among the different groups and individuals composing our society? How does this division affect the relations of the groups and individuals participating in it, and how do these relations, and the social phenomena which they produce, react upon the production and distribution of wealth in this society? What are the resulting laws governing the direction and manner of its general movement? What are the historical limits of this economic organization?
A careful examination of our wealth discloses the remarkable fact that, whereas, it consists, like all wealth, of articles ministering to the wants of the individuals of the society wherein it is produced, of whatever nature or character those wants may be, the amount of that wealth, from our social point of view, does not depend on the amount or number of those articles possessed by the individuals separately or society as a whole; that any individual member of our society may be possessed of great wealth without possessing any appreciable quantity of articles that would or could minister either to his own wants or to those of any other member of our society; that, as a rule, a man's wealth under our social system does not consist of articles which minister to his own wants, but to those of other people, if at all; and, furthermore, that a man's wealth may grow or shrink without any addition to or diminution from the articles or substances of which his wealth is composed.
This is an entirely novel phenomenon historically consid-
