lary that "wealth belongs to the producer thereof," made social justice a matter of distribution. Neither Haywood nor Walling grasped the point made by G. D. H. Cole when he said that slavery, not poverty, was the real issue. "Wage slavery," in their view, was a function of the private ownership of the means of production, which deprived the worker of "his share in the income of society," as Walling put it. Once capitalism was abolished, "wage slavery" would come to an end, even though wage labor, of course, would continue. There was "no authority" in Marx, Walling correctly observed, for the belief that "it would be necessary to abolish wages" in a socialist society. "It is 'wage slavery' or 'the wage system' that is to be abolished"—that is, the system of private ownership that prevented the worker from getting the "total product" of his labor. The capitalist's appropriation of the worker's "share," Walling argued, was the "very essence of social injustice." "The question ... is not whether from time to time something more falls to the workingman, but what proportion he gets of the total product."

Walling counted on this expansive conception of distributive justice to distinguish revolutionary socialism from progressivism and social democracy. Unlike revolutionaries, reformers aimed, he said, only to "increase the nation's wealth" and thereby "to increase everybody's income to some degree" without achieving a "fairer distribution of this increased national wealth and income" (his italics). Unfortunately for this argument, progressives and social democrats also favored a redistribution of wealth. Arthur Brisbane, chief editor of the Hearst newspaper chain, argued, in Walling's own words, that the worker had a right to the "full product of his labor"—a phrase, as Walling pointed out, that "might have been used by Marx himself." John Graham Brooks, noting that the gap between "large incomes and small ones" had grown steadily, declared, "The wage earner's contention that he should have a relatively larger share is justified." Mary Simkhovitch, a well-known leader in the settlement movement, also endorsed the worker's demand for higher wages and more leisure. Like many settlement workers, she criticized reform "from above" just as vigorously as Walling did, and for the same reason: it did not attack the problem of inequality. Paternalistic reforms made the "upper classes feel like benefactors," she wrote, but they did nothing "to redistribute wealth through improved methods of taxation."

What then became of the distinction between reform and revolution,

-334-