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 paradox to impart an air of mysticism into quite intelligible historic processes. My “Capitalism” ignored all theory that “did not present itself in the actual processes which I studied. The chief significance lay in its claim to be a scientific study, as contained in the Contemporary Science Series. My part in its production was almost a matter of chance. It was put upon me by my friend, William Clarke, one of the Fabian Essayists, who, after undertaking to write it, found that the labours of his journalistic career precluded fulfilment of his undertaking. Having more time at my disposal, and finding that the study was definitely useful for my lecture work, I took it in hand. The main part of the book was given to an account of the rôle played by modern machinery and power in enlarging the productivity of industry, increasing the importance of the employer, the organizer, and the owner of capital, in the economy of labour and the control of markets. The nature of most work, the conditions under which it was done, and the payment for it, were determined by the employer in all mechanized industries, and a new proletariat came into existence, divorced alike from all personal control of other factors of production than labour, and devoted to the performance of some single narrow action contributing to a complex co-operative process of production which had no human concern for the great mass of wage-earners. Although the story of these economic changes necessarily involved some account of the quantitative