Page:Confessions of an Economic Heretic.djvu/40

 credence would have attached to the statement that all the boys might win the Presidential post.

This country had grown so accustomed to the position of chief exporter and developer of backward lands that it is still difficult both for our capitalists and their economists to realize the momentous change that has taken place when a dozen other countries can compete with us on equal, sometimes superior, terms. The lesson, however, is everywhere being driven home for those who have thrown off the thraldom of the old political economy, and are able to put together the two salient economic facts of our time, the unprecedented unemployment and the movement of every country towards economic isolationism and protection of home markets.

This is not, however, clearly discernible in my first solid piece of economic writing in the early nineties, my Evolution of Modern Capitalism, an objective presentation of the industrial changes comprised under the Industrial Revolution in its British shape. Though | had read the English translation of Marx’s first volume of Das Kapital some years before, I made no attempt to assess the value of his revolutionary attack. I was deterred, in part, by what still seems to me his false endeavour to express all costs of production in terms of units of labour-time, a common measure which could never operate in actual industry; in part, by a Hegelian dialectic which used an empty intellectual