"Whoever is, no matter how little, acquainted, with the movement of political economy in England, cannot but know that nearly all the Socialists of that country have, at different times, proposed the equalitarian (that is to say, Socialist) application of the Ricardian theory." We might cite to M. Proudhon the "Political Economy" of Hopkins, 1822; William Thompson, "An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth most Conducive to Human Happiness," 1827; T. R. Edmonds, "Practical Moral and Political Economy," 1828, &c., &c., and we might add pages of "&c." We will content ourselves with hearing an English Communist, Bray, in his remarkable work, "Labor's Wrongs and Labor's Remedy," Leeds, 1839, and these quotations from Bray alone settle, for the most part, the claim to priority set up by Rodbertus.
At this time Marx had not entered the reading-room of the British Museum. Beyond the libraries, besides my books and my extracts, which he read during a journey of six weeks which we made together in England in the summer of 1845, he had perused only the books which one could procure at Manchester. The literature of which we have spoken was then not as inaccessible as it may be at the present time. If, in spite of that, it was unknown to Rodbertus, that is entirely due to the fact that he was an exclusive Prussian. He is the veritable founder of specifically Prussian Socialism, and he is at last recognized as such.
However, even in his beloved Prussia, Rodbertus could not remain in absolute ignorance of the work of others. In 1859 there appeared at Berlin the first book of the "Critique de l'Economie Politique," by Marx. There we find, among the objections raised by the economists against Ricardo, as second objection, p. 40:
