The history of society in the past is the history of class struggles. Freemen and slaves, patricians and plebians, nobles and serfs, guild members and journeymen - in short, oppressors and oppressed, have always stood in direct opposition to each other. The struggle between them has sometimes been open, sometimes concealed, but always continuous. A never ceasing struggle, which has invariably ended, either in a revolutionary alteration of the social system, or in the common destruction of the contending classes.

In earlier historical epochs we find almost everywhere a minute division of society into classes or castes - a variety of grades in social life. In Ancient Rome we find patricians, knights, plebians, slaves; in Medieval Europe, feudal lords, vassals, burghers, journeymen, serfs; and in each of these classes here were again grades and distinctions.

Modern bourgeois society which arose from the ruins of the ieudal system has not wiped out the antagonism of classes. New classes, new conditions of oppression, new modes and forms of carrying on the struggle, have been substituted for the old ones. The charateristic of our epoch - the epoch of the bourgeoisie, or middle class - is that the struggle between the various social classes has been reduced to its simplest form. Society tends more and more to be divided into two great hostile classes - the Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat.

From the serfs of the middle ages sprang the burgesses of the early Communes; and from this municipal class were developed the first elements of the Bourgeoisie. The discovery of America, the circumnavigation of Africa, gave the bourgeoisie or middle class - then coming into being - new and wider fields of action The colonization of America, the opening up of the East Indian and Chinese markets, the colonial trade, the increase may find the claims of socialism ably set forth and ably defended. Two of them we may properly examine at this point. (1) Marx insisted that laborers produced much more than they received in the form of wages. This excess he called surplus value. What he really meant was that the two shares in distribution, profits and interest, were really portions of wages withheld from labor. (2) Marx also held the view that the interests of capital and labor could never be reconciled. Hence he speaks of the "inevitable conflict" between these two factors in production. He believed, and his followers hold the same view, that it is only a question of time until the laborers of the world would be compelled to crush capitalism. Hence, they are inclined to oppose any schemes that have for their end the reconciliation of capital and labor. Here we have the reason for the inability of socialism and organized labor to agree. Organized labor recognizes the importance of the employer in industry. Moreover, its efforts are directed to the betterment of the working classes, and hence, a postponement of the "inevitable conflict."