CORNELL UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 NEW YORK STATE SCHOOL 
 
 OF 
 
 INDUSTRIAL AND LABOR 
 
 RELATIONS 
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 
 The Family of 
 Morris and Vera Hillquit 
 
Cornell University Library 
 HX 86.K18 
 
 What is socialism, 
 
 3 1924 002 673 840 
 
 
 
 
 From the Library of 
 
 MORRIS HILLQUIT 
 
 Presented 
 ill the memory of 
 
 MORRIS AND VERA HILLQUIT 
 
 M 
 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924002673840 
 
WHAT IS SOCIALISM 
 
WHAT IS SOCIALISM 
 
 BY 
 
 REGINALD WRIGHT KAUFFMAN 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY 
 
 igio 
 
COPTBIOHT, 1910, BT 
 
 MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY 
 New Yohk 
 
 All Righla Resereed 
 Published February, 1910 
 
 TBE QUIHN ft BODEN CO. PEESS 
 
 BAWWAy, N- }■ 
 
TO 
 JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER 
 
 AND 
 
 EUGENE V. DEBS 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The reason for the writing of most prefaces 
 is to set forth the purpose of the books that they 
 preface; but if the text of the present volume 
 does not interpret its own purpose, then that 
 purpose is defeated. My only need of a fore- 
 word is to make two acknowledgments. The 
 first of these is one of deep indebtedness to all 
 the authors mentioned in the bibliography in- 
 cluded in the Appendix of this book — especially 
 to John Spargo, whose work on " Socialism " 
 is so excellent an exposition of its subject that, 
 were it not avowedly a special plea, it would 
 leave small place for my endeavors. And the 
 second acknowledgment is that of a word re- 
 ceived while the last chapters of my own book 
 were being written — ^the word that, at the time 
 of his so much regretted death last Autumn, 
 Edmund Kelly was engaged upon just such 
 a task as mine. Had he lived to carry his 
 plans to completion, this able lawyer, ripe 
 scholar and keen logician would, beyond ques- 
 tion, have won success where, it may very well 
 be, I have encountered at least partial failure. 
 
 R. W. K. 
 
 New York City, 
 ist January, igio. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. The Modern Devil . . . i 
 
 II. The Point of Departure . . 28 
 
 III. The Ascent of Man ... 62 
 
 iV. Whither? 95 
 
 V. The War of the Classes . . 104 
 
 VI. The Apostle to the Gentiles . 139 
 
 VII. The Propaganda .... 160 
 
 VIII. The Co-operative Common- 
 wealth 183 
 
 APPENDIX I— The Communistic Mani- 
 festo 221 
 
 APPENDIX II— Socialist Platform, 
 Preamble and Declaration of 
 
 Principles, igo8 . . . 239 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 251 
 
 INDEX 253 
 
WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 I 
 
 THE MODERN DEVIL 
 
 " Knowledge being to be had only of visible and cer- 
 tain truth, error is not a fault of our knowledge, but a 
 mistake of our judgment, giving assent to that which 
 is not true." 
 
 — Locke, Human Understanding, Bk. IV., ch. xx. 
 
 One Autumn afternoon, about fifteen years 
 ago, I happened, on my way home from school, 
 to be seated in a street-car behind two mem- 
 bers of the faculty of a small college in central 
 Pennsylvania. The pair were discussing the 
 apparently wretched reputation of a third per- 
 son unknown to me, and the elder educator 
 rounded out his sweeping condemnation with a 
 single fatal phrase: 
 
 " Why," said he, " the man's a Socialist! " 
 It was not so very long after the Haymarket 
 tragedy in Chicago but that the distinctive 
 word contained quite as much terror for me as 
 he who uttered it patently intended it should 
 have for him to whom it was addressed. 
 
2 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 Nevertheless, Socialism and Socialists were as 
 vague in my mind as they were awful, and, 
 realizing that I was in the company of the 
 Wise Men, I therefore pricked up my ears for 
 the reply to the question with which the second 
 member of a college faculty in the Year of 
 Our Lord 1893 countered this remark. 
 
 " Just how would you define Socialism, any- 
 way? " he asked. 
 
 It was an inquiry, I have since come to 
 know, that few other scholars have been able 
 to answer in anything briefer than a volume; 
 but the sage of the street-car hesitated not. 
 
 " Socialism," he declared, " is masked 
 Anarchy; but it has no more chance of succeed- 
 ing than if it dropped the mask." 
 
 I do not censure the professor, except per- 
 haps because he spoke prof essorily ; but I do 
 say that he was wrong. Whether Socialism is 
 to succeed or to fail remains, of course, to be 
 seen; yet, succeeding or failing, it is no more 
 Anarchism than it is any of the half-dozen 
 other things that it is popularly believed to 
 be, and, even if it were all of these and more 
 beside, it is recognized by every keen-visioned 
 student of politics and economics as the next 
 great problem that will confront the voters of 
 America. 
 
THE MODERN DEVIL 3 
 
 Upon this point, if upon no other, Socialists 
 and non-SociaHsts are agreed. Another pro- 
 fessor, Mr. Herbert Spencer, several years ago 
 brought the matter into general prominence 
 when, in a treatise called " The Coming 
 Slavery," he predicted, with gloomy forebod- 
 ings, the ultimate victory of Socialism. 
 Though his wish was so far from being a 
 father to his thought, he may have erred as 
 much on one side as the Pennsylvania in- 
 structor erred upon the other; yet, at his com- 
 mand, politicians everywhere opened their eyes 
 to find that a new and still increasing army 
 had advanced upon them as if by night. In 
 this country the astute Mark Hanna flatly 
 stated that old party lines are soon to vanish in 
 the formation of a great conservative coalition 
 to front this latter-day radicalism, and only a 
 twelvemonth ago a President of the United 
 States officially warned his people against " the 
 growing menace of Socialism." From the view 
 of the specialist, practical or theoretical, favor- 
 able or opposed, there to-day remains no doubt 
 but that Socialism must soon be met in a 
 desperate, even a life-and-death, struggle at 
 the polls. 
 
 In these circumstances, it is the obvious duty 
 pf every voter tq ynderst^nd what 3ogiali§m 
 
4 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 is, in order that he may intelligently support 
 what is good, or, with equal intelligence, cast 
 his ballot against what is evil. Here is a party 
 which, in America alone, has grown from 21,- 
 164 votes in 1892 to between 600,000 and 
 650,000 votes in 1908, and yet the great mass 
 of our voters are quite as ignorant of what it 
 is trying to do as was my street-car professor 
 seventeen years ago. In i860 the people, as a 
 people, knew what was meant by Abolition and 
 States Rights; in the early Eighties they were 
 familiar with the general outlines of Free 
 Trade, Protection and Tariff for Revenue 
 Only; in 1896 they were able to converse in 
 the vocabulary of an unlimited coinage of sil- 
 ver at the ratio of Sixteen to One; but in 19 10, 
 in spite of the growth of education, they can- 
 not give a meaning to the term " Socialism." 
 
 Why? 
 
 The reason is not, after all, so far to seek, 
 and though the Socialists are in some measure 
 to blame for a scornfully doctrinaire attitude 
 rather too common among them, though they 
 are prone to cloak their message in the highly 
 technical language of their own particular 
 brand of political economy, their opponents 
 are almost equally to blame for a refusal to 
 listen or to study. The radical leader is 
 
THE MODERN DEVIL 5 
 
 generally too rapt to produce a primer, and the 
 propagandist of conservatism sees no need of 
 reading his rival's text-books so long as the 
 majority of voters remain ignorant thereof. 
 The result is that the word " Socialism " is 
 now in current use to describe many mutually 
 antagonistic theories and tendencies, nearly all 
 of which have no part in the Socialist pro- 
 gramme. 
 
 Generally speaking, the term " Socialism " 
 is still one of reproach. It is loosely applied 
 to any innovation of the established social 
 order, or to any new scheme for the relief or 
 change of present social conditions. Mr. 
 Samuel Gompers, president of the American 
 Federation of Labor, though one of the most 
 bitter opponents of Socialism, is by thousands 
 of persons supposed to be a Socialist because of 
 his association with trades-unionism. With 
 him would be instantly ranked, especially if he 
 wore a soft shirt and long hair, any Congress- 
 man who introduced a bill for old-age pensions 
 or the national ownership of the cut-glass in- 
 dustry. Socialistic panaceas have, under this 
 definition, been offered alike by Theodore 
 Roosevelt in the White House and Emma 
 Goldman on a street-corner. 
 
6 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 When, however, the crop of misconceptions 
 is thoroughly threshed, three distinct notions 
 seem to predominate : 
 
 (i) In the first place, there are the people 
 that accept the professor's definition of 
 Anarchy (Anarchism) in disguise: to them 
 Socialism means the bomb and the torch, the 
 knife of assassination and the musket of revo- 
 lution. 
 
 (2) Next come those who honestly believe 
 that Socialism means the destruction of the 
 rights of property : they think that it heralds a 
 day when every citizen will have to empty his 
 pockets into a common fund, and when that 
 fund will be divided equally, at so mvich per 
 capita, among the whole population; or, as 
 they would put it, when the man with but a 
 crust gives up that crust to the State in order 
 to have a chance to seize the whole loaf, which 
 his formerly more fortunate brother had, at 
 the same time, to surrender. 
 
 (3) Lastly appear those who say that 
 Socialism is a scheme for the absolute 
 centralization of government, with a maze 
 of legislation that would control practically 
 all the activities of life and stamp out the 
 individual, and which would amount to a pa- 
 ternalistic rule by a bureaucracy, putting an 
 
THE MODERN DEVIL 7 
 
 end to effort and placing a premium upon 
 pauperism. 
 
 In other words, these belief^ are that Social- 
 ism is : 
 
 (i) Anarchism. 
 
 (2) Communism. 
 
 (3) Paternalism. 
 
 Keep these definitions in mind. They are 
 definitions that you would get — no matter how 
 futile his own creed may be — from no sane 
 Socialist : but they are the definitions that 
 popularly obtain, and we shall shortly have to 
 return to them in order to show wherein they 
 err. 
 
 I have said that ignorance of Socialism was 
 partly due to the lofty attitude of many Social- 
 istic propagandists and partly due to the will- 
 ingness of the conservatives to take advantage 
 of that attitude. But besides ignorance there 
 is a generally bitter prejudice against both this 
 theory of radicalism and those who preach it. 
 The prejudice, like all prejudices, is more or 
 less dependent upon ignorance; it owes some- 
 thing to the loose usage of the term " Social- 
 ism " as above referred to, and it is, of course, 
 not unnaturally fostered by the leaders of the 
 old regime. Yet, in the last analysis, it owes 
 quite half of its strength to the Socialists them- 
 
8 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 selves, and this for reasons that should be 
 thoroughly explained before an exposition of 
 the genuine issues of Socialism is attempted. 
 
 Just when Socialism as a political creed first 
 got its head above the waters of popular in- 
 terest in the United States — which was long 
 before it became the menace to the elder parties 
 that it is to-day — the entire country was cast 
 into a panic by the Haymarket bomb-throwing 
 in Chicago with its instant record of blood and 
 its speedy denoument upon the scaffold. The 
 condemned men were one and all Anarchists, 
 and, though some of them subsequently de- 
 clared themselves opposed to violence, all of 
 them were proud of their political creed. The 
 newspaper reports of the affair, however, re- 
 ferred to the prisoners only some of the time 
 as Anarchists or "Nihilists" and the rest of the 
 time as Socialists; and when certain bond iide 
 Socialists, protesting that they had nothing in 
 common with ■ Anarchism, nevertheless came 
 forward to declare that the trial was illegally 
 conducted and that its termination was the 
 consequence of passion rather than the conclu- 
 sions of the law and the evidence, public 
 opinion immediately decided that Socialism at 
 least sympathized with riot and mob-rule, and 
 
THE MODERN DEVIL 9 
 
 the prejudice whereof we have just spoken was 
 born. 
 
 Nor has its growth been retarded by certain 
 symbols and phrases in the SociaHstic propa- 
 ganda. The Socialists wear a red button, 
 sometimes illuminated by a flaming torch, and 
 in their street-parades they follow a red flag. 
 They talk a great deal about a " War of the 
 Classes." And they boldly declare that they 
 are enlisted in the cause of the " Social Revo- 
 lution." 
 
 Now, as the confusion following the Hay- 
 market trials was due on the one part to il- 
 literacy among the reporters and on the other 
 to an excess of zeal over discretion among a 
 few individual Socialists, so are the misap- 
 prehensions concerning these symbols due to 
 preconceived ideas in the public mind. Here 
 are the popular interpretations and the Social- 
 ists' explanations : 
 
 A Black Flag is the traditional flag of 
 piracy, and the banner of Anarchism is black. 
 But in some manner most of us have come to as- 
 sociate a red emblem with rather active trouble, 
 perhaps because we have had some experience 
 with a red bandanna handkerchief and a bull, 
 or perhaps because red is the color of blood. 
 Consequently, it is to be expected that the ma- 
 
lo WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 jority of us would regard men who paraded 
 under the red flag as men who proposed to 
 clear their pasture at the cost of human life. 
 
 The Socialist, however, protests that nothing 
 is farther from his intention, that his flag does 
 not mean that he wants to kill some men, but 
 that it does mean that he regards all men as 
 his brothers. He admits that he has chosen 
 red as his color because it is the color of human 
 blood, but he means, he says, to show thereby 
 that, though man differs from man in customs, 
 speech, apparel and hue, all men are of a com- 
 mon stock and all blood-brethren as the sons 
 of God. 
 
 The flaming torch would seem to be more 
 difificult of explanation. It would surely ap- 
 pear that a torch can mean just one thing, and 
 that is a fire. From the days when Samson 
 made firebrands of his three hundred foxes, 
 sword and flame have gone hand in hand 
 through the pages of history. The conclusion 
 is clear : that party, or that portion of a party,* 
 whose emblem is a torch must be composed of 
 apostles of violence and advocates of ruin. 
 
 Not so the Socialist. He points to New 
 
 * The torch as a Socialist symbol is more common in 
 New York than elsewhere, clasped hands being the 
 usual emblem. 
 
THE MODERN DEVIL ii 
 
 York's statue of Liberty Enlightening the 
 World ; he calls attention to the fact that, from 
 time's beginnings, the torch has been the sym- 
 bol of freedom and of learning, and he avows 
 that it was as such a symbol that he adopted it. 
 
 When we come to the Class Conflict and the 
 Social Revolution, we are upon two doctrines 
 of such import that their detailed consideration 
 must be postponed until the theories upon 
 which they are based shall have been explained 
 in several chapters. It is enough now to say 
 that here again, in the Socialist's opinion, we 
 are confused by words, not things. 
 
 What is variously called " The War of the 
 Classes," "The Class Conflict" and "The 
 Class Struggle " is really nothing more than 
 Socialism's doctrine that, far from the welfare 
 of Capital and Labor being identical, the good 
 of the one is fundamentally opposed to the 
 good of the other. In this interpretation, the 
 relation between the capitalistic, or employing, 
 class and the laboring, or employed, class be- 
 comes very much like the relation between two 
 neighboring rival merchants who handle the 
 same commodity. Each is trying to sell the 
 same article of trade — we shall say tea — to the 
 same small group of people; the interests of 
 one are clearly opposed to those of the other, 
 
12 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 for every sale of tea that A makes is one 
 possible sale less of tea for B and every 
 customer that B gains robs A of a possible 
 purchaser. Between these two merchants 
 there is therefore a struggle of opposing in- 
 terests, and, according to the Socialists, there 
 is much such a struggle — that is to say, a 
 struggle of opposing interests, a struggle of 
 intellect rather than of physical force — in- 
 herent in the relations between Capital and 
 Labor. That struggle, because it is a struggle 
 between classes — the working class and the 
 employing class — the Socialist calls the " Class 
 War," or " Conflict," or " Struggle." 
 
 Decidedly like is the misunderstanding of 
 the phrase " Social Revolution." This does 
 not mean, the Socialist assures us, that an army 
 of Sansculottes will level Joliet, that a Com- 
 mittee of Public Safety will rule in the Capitol, 
 or that a Knifie of the Convention will crop 
 heads in Madison Square. Socialism believes 
 that the greatest revolution that the world has 
 yet seen was the introduction of machinery, 
 accomplished almost in silence and quite with- 
 out a battle, but resulting in the craftsmen los- 
 ing the simple tools with which they used to 
 work and having, in consequence, to work no 
 longer for themselves, but for the capitalists 
 
THE MODERN DEVIL 13 
 
 who could afford to buy the more compHcated, 
 more expensive and more commercially effect- 
 ive machines. And what Socialism — rightly 
 or wrongly, effectively or futilely — proposes 
 by " The Social Revolution " is simply another 
 such silent and peaceful turning-over of the 
 industrial system whereby the machines now 
 owned by the few for the profit of the few 
 shall be acquired and operated by the majority 
 for the benefit of all. 
 
 In these brief outlines of the Class Struggle 
 and the Social Revolution it will be seen that 
 we were not far wrong when we concluded 
 that the extremely technical language in which 
 Socialism is habited is one of the chief reasons 
 why it is so widely misunderstood. Most of 
 us know very little about political economy, 
 and few of us are attracted to the study of a 
 subject by the knowledge that, before we can 
 begin our task, we must first master a new 
 language. And yet the Socialist rather likes 
 to fling his phrases. It is his frequent pleasure 
 to mystify with such terms as " the Marxian 
 " Philosophy," " the Communist Manifesto," 
 " the Materialistic Conception of History," 
 " Wage-Slavery," " Capitalistic Concentra- 
 tion," " Interindustrial Trustification," the 
 
14 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 " Doctrine of Surplus Value " and " Taff 
 Vale Law." Reassure yourself. In order to 
 understand the basic theories of Socialism it 
 is not necessary to master all of its terminology, 
 and, at any rate, the majority of the things so 
 mightily entitled are reducible, upon a near ap- 
 proach, to a reasonable simplicity 
 
 One more difficulty, however, there is fre- 
 quently presented by the curbstone critic, 
 which is equally illusory. It is commonly said 
 by him that no two Socialists will give the 
 same definition of Socialism. 
 
 Without holding a brief either for or against 
 the radical creed, the fair-minded might, with 
 equal justice, expect a uniform answer from 
 Republicans to the question : " What is Re- 
 publicanism ? " — or look for clarity in the re- 
 pHes of Democrats to the query: "What is 
 Democracy?" As a matter of fact, each of 
 the older parties has stood for a wide variety 
 of policies. Sometimes these policies did not 
 completely accord with former policies es- 
 poused by the same party, and more often than 
 not the especial policy espoused by one party 
 in an especial campaign has been bitterly de- 
 nounced by members of that party, who by no 
 means considered themselves as thereby be- 
 
THE MODERN DEVIL 15 
 
 coming one whit less Republicans or Demo-, 
 crats than they had always been theretofore. 
 
 In other words, these are merely tactical 
 policies, methods of meeting this or that issue 
 of the passing day; they in no wise affect the 
 fundamental integrity of the party that for- 
 mulated them, and therefore acceptance of 
 them was not at all necessary to continued 
 membership in the party. There are still 
 some Democrats who believe in the doctrine of 
 Free Silver, and there are many essential Re- 
 publicans who advocate Free Trade; yet 
 Democracy has long rejected the former theory 
 and Republicanism never even leaned toward 
 the latter. The questions were questions of 
 party tactics, and not questions of fundamental 
 ideals. Either because of them or in spite of 
 them, each party remained a distinct political 
 entity built upon a distinct idea of government 
 " of the people, for the people and by the 
 people." 
 
 Socialists are no less human than Re- 
 publicans and Democrats. They differ among 
 themselves, and differ widely, upon certain 
 questions of party tactics; but they do agree 
 upon a distinct idea of the duties and methods 
 of government; their reason for existence as 
 a party is that idea, and that idea alone. When 
 
i6 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 the fundamental idea is defined. Socialism be- 
 comes at least intelligible, and with the funda- 
 mental idea, with the common basis of Social- 
 ism, we shall, if you please, chiefly concern 
 ourselves. 
 
 The clearest method of explaining what any 
 system is, begins by explaining what it is not. 
 We have seen that the most popular misconcep- 
 tions of Socialism are three in number, that is 
 to say: (i) That Socialism is Anarchism; (2) 
 that it is Communism, and (3) that it is Pater- 
 nalism. Now for a statement of Socialism's 
 actual quarrel with each of these doctrines 
 which are attributed to it. 
 
 ( I ) Anarchism is of two kinds : the philo- 
 sophic and what we may mildly call the mili- 
 tant. Both kinds are, however, the very 
 antithesis of Socialism and differ between 
 themselves not as to what order of things 
 should be, but as to how, if at all, such an order 
 is to be brought about. 
 
 The Philosophic Anarchist is, indeed, So- 
 cialism's most violent opponent. He advocates 
 a political rather than an industrial revolution; 
 his brief is against the centralization of gov- 
 ernment either wholly, as under absolute 
 monarchy, or in part, as under democracy. 
 
THE MODERN DEVIL 17 
 
 Thus in an Anarchistic form of society, public 
 power and governmental authority would, to 
 all intents and purposes, disappear. 
 
 Socialism, on the other hand, offers not a 
 political, but an industrial system; its brief is 
 against the centralization of the means of pro- 
 duction and, consequently, of wealth. Never- 
 theless, for the institution and maintenance of 
 such a system, its theory contemplates certain 
 political changes, or developments, tending not 
 to dissipate, but to strengthen public power, 
 not to curtail, but greatly to extend, the scope 
 of government. 
 
 As Dr. William B. Guthrie, of the College 
 of the City of New York, a non-Socialist, has 
 put it : * " Under a regime where Socialistic 
 theories dominate comes a vast increase of the 
 application of public power. Instead of weak- 
 ening government it has from the first tended 
 to strengthen it. Socialism in its development 
 has placed more power in the public organs; it 
 has. widened the collective control; it has given 
 to government enlarged spheres of action and 
 limited the area of private initiative and con- 
 trol. Socialism holds to the importance of 
 absolute power of government in an enlarged 
 
 * " Socialism before the French Revolution, A His- 
 tory." 
 
i8 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 sphere and leads to an exaggeration of public 
 authority; anarchism in an equal degree em- 
 phasizes the importance and the absoluteness 
 of the individual." And Dr. Guthrie well 
 quotes Sanborn : * " For the Anarchist the bet- 
 terment of society depends primarily upon the 
 betterment of the individual; while for the 
 Socialist the betterment of the individual de- 
 pends primarily upon the betterment of society. 
 The complete realization of socialism pre- 
 supposes the perfection of human machinery, 
 and the complete realization of anarchism the 
 perfection of human nature." Briefly, then, 
 Socialism's scheme for the public control of 
 the industrial means of production frankly 
 calls for governmental interference and thus 
 demands not less government of all kinds, 
 which the Anarchist wants, but a great deal 
 more government of the democratic kind, 
 which the Anarchist abhors. 
 
 The Militant Anarchist, accepting his philo- 
 sophic brother's plan for political regeneration, 
 and, like that brother, presupposing " the per- 
 fection of human nature," believes that he can 
 bring about the regeneration by armed revolu- 
 tion and not sully the perfection by assassina- 
 tion. One is not criticising liis theory; one is 
 *" Paris and the Social Revolution." 
 
THE MODERN DEVIL 19 
 
 but stating it : the Militant Anarchist hopes to 
 succeed by the bullet. The Socialist, however, 
 believing in an industrial regeneration and pre- 
 supposing the present fallibility of human 
 nature, thinks that he can bring about his in- 
 dustrial regeneration only by a gradual and 
 peaceable revolution at the polls, and that he 
 must not endanger his cause by any appeal to 
 the imperfection of human nature that would 
 unduly unsettle industry. One is not praising 
 his theory; one is but stating it: the Socialist 
 hopes to succeed by the ballot. 
 
 It is necessary to remember what was said 
 of the Social Revolution, the only soi;t of rev- 
 olution that Socialism contemplates. This, 
 like the great revolution produced by the in- 
 troduction of machinery, " is simply another 
 silent and peaceful turning-over of the indus- 
 trial system whereby the machines now owned 
 by the few for the profit of the few shall be 
 acquired and operated by the majority for the 
 benefit of all." Anarchism, denying govern- 
 ment, can neither want nor receive a place upon 
 the ballot, and buys dynamite; Socialism, af- 
 firming government, has secured a place upon 
 the ballot and is spending its money and its 
 energies for the formation of a political party 
 to hasten a state of society conceived by it 
 
20 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 to be a logical stage in the process of social 
 evolution. The Militant Anarchist beHeves in 
 violence as a propaganda and has the courage 
 of his convictions; the Socialist, equally cour- 
 ageous, believes in education as a propaganda, 
 decries war even in the form of business com- 
 petition, argues that he must win public sym- 
 pathy in order to win votes, and insists that 
 assassination is not only legally wrong, but 
 that it is a tactical blunder, because it has al- 
 ways, in the long run, defeated its own ends. 
 
 It is thus clear that Socialism is irreconcil- 
 ably antipathetic to Anarchism, both philo- 
 sophic and militant. Its final divergence from 
 Communism is almost as wide. 
 
 (2) Communism demands "an equal quan- 
 titative distribution of the material wealth re- 
 gardless of problems of value;"* it would 
 entirely do away with private property. In its 
 beginnings, as we shall later see, all society was 
 communistic,! the natural result of primitive 
 conditions and admirably suited to the simple 
 industrial forms of clan-life where a few men, 
 united by close ties of blood, lived in amity 
 among themselves and in enmity to all other 
 clans. The prevailing social order of to-day — 
 
 * Guthrie. 
 
 t Kautsky, " Vorlaufer des neueren Socialismus." 
 
THE MODERN DEVIL 2i 
 
 that is to say, Capitalism — is based on what it 
 holds to be the rights of private ownership, 
 and, when Communism would make a state 
 that would be nothing but a tremendous 
 industrial corporation, Capitalism sharply 
 separates government from industry and in- 
 sists upon the state being a purely political 
 entity. 
 
 To both of these theories Socialism finds it- 
 self opposed. Its opposition to Capitalism will 
 be made clear in a succeeding chapter; al- 
 though the nature of that opposition is not 
 generally understood, its existence is nowhere 
 doubted, and we are now concerned only with 
 the differentiation between Socialism and the 
 three things with which Socialism is most fre- 
 quently confused. 
 
 Communism, then, demands that all men 
 shall share and share alike; Socialism that each 
 man shall receive in accordance with what he 
 gives. In the Socialist's view, under society 
 as at present organized, A owns the tools; B 
 has the necessity to use the tools, and A pays 
 B wages for the time B spends in working 
 with the tools, A meanwhile keeping the article 
 that B produced with A's tools and selling 
 this article for a price which will reimburse A 
 for the wages paid B and for the permission 
 
22 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 given B to use the tools and still leave a profit 
 that A puts into his own purse. 
 
 Now, says the Socialist, between the owner- 
 ship of those tools in the first instance and the 
 use of those tools in the second, something was 
 produced that could be sold for more money 
 — was of more value — ^than A the owner ex- 
 pended. That something, that surplus value, 
 the Socialist contends, was created not by A, 
 the owner of the tools — he was paid for his 
 ownership out of the primary profit — ^but by 
 B, who used the tools, and the profit therefore 
 should not go to A, but to B. The Socialist 
 grants that A may be rewarded for his owner- 
 ship and for the opportunity provided B, but 
 he maintains that B should be rewarded for 
 his time and should receive that " surplus 
 value " which he has created. This is the 
 Socialistic doctrine of " the surplus value," 
 enunciated by Karl Marx, and, when this is 
 understood, it will be seen that Dr. Guthrie, 
 going a step farther, has some foundation for 
 his opinion when he says: 
 
 " Based on the Marxian formula, socialism 
 demands, not that all shall share and share 
 alike, but that all shall share according to 
 sacrifice ; that is, that the laborer shall get the 
 entire product of his labor. Socialism, then. 
 
THE MODERN DEVIL 23 
 
 differs from communism in that it rests its 
 claims upon the merits of labor, falls back to 
 the ethics of product. . . . Communism rests 
 its claim upon the wants of its clientage and 
 hence has a philanthropic and not an economic 
 basis." 
 
 (3) Having thus seen that Socialism is 
 neither the Anarchism nor yet the Communism 
 which it is so often supposed to be, there re- 
 mains to be inquired into the assertion that it 
 is Paternalism. 
 
 As applied by critics of Socialism, this term, 
 Paternalism, means simply an absolute rule by 
 a bureaucracy; " a scheme," as we defined it a 
 moment ago, " for the absolute centralization 
 of government, with a maze of legislation 
 that would control practically all the activi- 
 ties of life and stamp out the individual . . . 
 putting an end to effort and placing a premium 
 upon pauperism." Under its regime the home 
 would disappear, mankind would be housed in 
 dormitories, the men and women known, per- 
 haps, by numbers, the ideal of the family re- 
 duced to zero, and each citizen confined to the 
 performance of an allotted narrow task in such 
 manner as to be no more than a small part of 
 a great machine. 
 
 This is no overstatement of the view in 
 
24 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 question. Many critics have gone farther, 
 and a few romancers — honestly beheving 
 themselves to be Socialists, though they were 
 practically unacquainted , with the political 
 economy of Socialism — have been not far 
 behind. 
 
 Standing as he does for governmental cen- 
 tralization, the Socialist protests that centrali- 
 zation is in no wise incompatible with a society 
 which grants the largest possible degree of 
 liberty and opportunity for individual develop- 
 ment. He argues that each citizen has a right 
 to such development, so long as that develop- 
 ment does not infringe upon the similar right 
 of another citizen; but that when such an in- 
 fringement proceeds, the right cannot proceed. 
 
 Thus, a man has a right, according to the 
 Socialist, to stop one sort of work and take up 
 another; but he has no right willingly to cease 
 all work and tax society for his support. 
 Thus, too, a man may successfully protest 
 against compulsory vaccination, so long as the 
 other men in his town are not — or believe that 
 they are not — endangered thereby; but if the 
 many become convinced that a scourge of 
 smallpox may be prevented by general com- 
 pulsory vaccination, then the protestant must 
 succumb and the personal liberty of the one 
 
THE MODERN DEVIL 25 
 
 make way for the personal liberty of the 
 many. 
 
 Men, the Socialist continues, are of a general 
 likeness in the essentials of human life, but 
 of a general diversity in almost everything 
 else. The problem of government is, there- 
 fore, to establish a synthesis between personal 
 and social liberty, to give equal chances for in- 
 dividual development, while enforcing upon 
 each individual equal obligations to all other 
 individuals. Some of the details of the Social- 
 istic scheme to effect this end will be con- 
 sidered in a later chapter; the general theory 
 is here stated to show that the Socialist dis- 
 cards Paternalism. 
 
 The three popular misconceptions of Social- 
 ism are thus sufficiently cleared away to leave 
 us free to proceed with our exposition : 
 
 (i) Socialism is not Anarchism, because 
 Socialism demands not less government of all 
 kinds, which Anarchism wants, but a great 
 deal more government' of the democratic kind, 
 which Anarchism abhors. 
 
 (2) Socialism is not Communism, because 
 Communism demands that all men share 
 and share alike, whereas Socialism demands 
 that each man receive in accordance with 
 
26 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 that which, in the SociaHst's opinion, he 
 gives. 
 
 (3) Socialism is not Paternalism, because 
 Paternalism would sacrifice individuality, 
 whereas Socialism seeks to give equal chances 
 for individual development while enforcing 
 upon each individual equal obligations to all 
 other individuals. 
 
 Writing to a Parisian friend in the October 
 of 1905, Herbert Spencer said : 
 
 " First, Socialism will, in the face of all op- 
 position, eventually triumph. Second, its 
 triumph will be the greatest misfortune in the 
 history of the world. Third, it will, in a brief 
 time or long, be ended by military despotism." * 
 
 Whatever the worth of this prophecy — for 
 even the most worthy philosophers are not 
 necessarily among the worthy prophets — it 
 was clearly based upon a thorough understand- 
 ing of the Socialistic theory of Socialism as a 
 law of social evolution. When one has mas- 
 tered that, one has mastered, in the rough, 
 precisely what Socialism claims to be, and the 
 best brief statement of that so-called law — it is 
 known as the Materiahstic Conception of His- 
 tory — was thus made by an ultra-conservative 
 * Paris Figaro, December, 1905. 
 
THE MODERN DEVIL 27 
 
 organ, the New York Nation, not many 
 months ago : 
 
 " Historical evolution is shaped, not by ideas, 
 but by mechanical necessity. The moral ideals 
 of society, its religious creeds, its political, 
 legal and social institutions, are all the out- 
 growth of economic conditions. This may be 
 sneered at as a glorified sovereignty of the 
 stomach, but there are your facts. In the long 
 result, it is the producers who shape and rule 
 society, and history is the story of conflict 
 between a class of producers who would retain 
 their control over society after their usefulness 
 is gone, and a new class of producers struggling 
 to come into its own. But it is evident that 
 democracy has put power into the hands of the 
 great mass of the world's workers. Hence 
 these masses are ultimately bound to change 
 society so as to assure their own welfare and 
 domination. Q. E. D." 
 
 How this theory is supported, how it is ap- 
 plied and what its believers think will be its 
 ultimate efifects, we shall now proceed at length 
 to consider. 
 
II 
 
 THE POINT OF DEPARTURE 
 
 " Labor was the first price, the original purchase- 
 money that was paid for all things.'' 
 
 — Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations. 
 
 In my endeavor to differentiate Socialism 
 from the various theories vs^ith which it is most 
 frequently confounded, it was necessary to em- 
 phasize the economic phase of the Socialistic 
 propaganda. At first this emphasis may have 
 seemed to be employed with undue insistence; 
 but, surely, as the definitions unfolded, it must 
 have become clear that, though the voters of 
 America are about to be called upon to make 
 the acquaintance of Socialism as a political 
 movement, Socialism in its essence is really an 
 economic movement expressing itself politi- 
 cally. 
 
 Now, most of us know that political econ- 
 omy is the dryest of studies — and that is 
 about all that most of us know, or care to 
 28 
 
THE POINT OF DEPARTURE 29 
 
 know, concerning it. We have seen, moreover, 
 that Socialistic poHtical economy is generally 
 habited in language peculiarly technical, and 
 that it is thereby peculiarly awesome. But 
 to come to a thorough understanding of this 
 political issue which, supported by figures, 
 two such differing seers as Herbert Spencer 
 and Mark Hanna agreed must shortly con- 
 front mankind, it is obviously compulsory 
 that we first understand the issue's economic 
 essentials; and, frankly, the way to the acquit- 
 tal of this task should be no more beset by ter- 
 rifying technical titles than was the way, in 
 the previous chapter, to an explanation of the 
 terms " Class Struggle " and " Social Revolu- 
 tion " — should be, in fact, uninteresting only 
 if you have no interest in your rent, your 
 butcher's bill, or the price that you pay for the 
 clothes on your back. 
 
 In the briefest summary compatible with 
 clarity — and that is the only sort of summary 
 we shall attempt — these economic essentials 
 are five in number: 
 
 (i) Capital. 
 
 (2) Use-Value. 
 
 (3) Exchange- Value. 
 
 (4) Labor. 
 
 (5) Profit. 
 
30 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 (i) Capital 
 
 Capital, according to the political econ- 
 omists of Capitalism as opposed to those of 
 Socialism, is the ownership of useful things, 
 or at all events of the capabilities for use that 
 are inherent in those things. 
 
 In his primitive state, man lived by the hunt. 
 What he wanted for food he slew with the 
 rude bow and asrow that he himself had 
 made; what he needed to wear he secured 
 from the skins of the animals he had thus 
 slain, and what he required by way of shelter 
 he tore from the trees or gathered from the 
 rocks that filled his hunting-ground. For 
 his existence in this condition, the implements 
 of the hunt were therefore the sole necessities, 
 were about the only useful manufactured arti- 
 cles, and ownership of these articles consti- 
 tuted the first Capital. 
 
 As society became more complex, as trade 
 developed and as manufacture grew, although 
 the relations of mankind waxed infinitely more 
 varied. Capital, though it changed in degree, 
 did not,^ according to the Capitalistic econo- 
 mists, change in kind, has not changed, nor can 
 ever change, its nature. Men now and always 
 must eat, must be clothed against the cold and 
 
THE POINT OF DEPARTURE 31 
 
 housed against the elements, and whoso owns 
 a herd of cattle, a bolt of cloth, or the bricks 
 and mortar, slate, wood and nails that go to 
 the making of a house, owns Capital. That 
 owner may be an individual or a corporation, 
 may possess only enough to supply a small 
 portion of mankind, or produce or control 
 enough for all the world, may command or 
 make the finished product — the effect is the 
 same : what is his is only the primitive man's 
 bow and arrows in a more highly developed 
 form; is Use-Value; is Capital. 
 
 To this the Socialist gives small assent. It 
 may be partially true, he says, that, in primi- 
 tive times. Capital was the ownership of Use- 
 Value, but that truth, he maintains, passed 
 with the passage of the primitive, and this for 
 the reason that, under society as at present 
 constituted — i.e., under Capitalism — the vast 
 majority of men cannot produce all that they 
 need — because they need more than a bow and 
 arrows — and cannot use all that they produce 
 — because the vast majority are not producing 
 articles of immediate or inherent and direct 
 usefulness to themselves. 
 
 Karl Marx, the father of Socialism, in his 
 great work, " Das Capital," the Bible of that 
 faith, begins by explaining that, under Capital- 
 
32 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 ism, a commodity is the unit of wealth, and a 
 commodity, he declares, must possess the 
 ability to satisfy some human need or desire so 
 general as to make the article so called ex- 
 changeable for other articles possessing a 
 similar ability to satisfy a similar need.* 
 Capital, therefore, say the Marxians, is not the 
 ownership of Use-Values — cattle, cloth, lum- 
 ber — or of gold, bonds, or money of them- 
 selves; it is not even the ownership of a ma- 
 chine for the manufacture of Use- Values : " A 
 certain machine, for example, is a machine for 
 spinning cotton; it is only under certain de- 
 fined conditions that it becomes Capital; apart 
 from these conditions it is no more capital than 
 gold per se is money." t 
 
 Since, then, the majority of individuals are 
 engaged in producing what they themselves 
 cannot directly use, and since they cannot pro- 
 duce what they directly need; since, in short, 
 they are, on the contrary, producing something 
 that is to be sold for a profit — producing, 
 
 *"A commodity is, in the first place, an object out- 
 side of us; a thing that, by its properties, satisfies 
 human wants of some sort or another. The nature 
 of such wants — whether, for instance, they spring from 
 the stomach or from fancy — makes no difference." 
 —Karl Marx, Das Capital. 
 
 t Gabriel Deville, The People's Marx. 
 
THE POINT OF DEPARTURE 33 
 
 that is to say, wealth in the shape of a com- 
 modity — it becomes evident, say the Socialists, 
 that their product must indeed be exchangeable 
 or saleable, must have a Social-Use-Value. 
 Thus, the owner of a rolling-mill may not him- 
 self use the rails which his mill produces; but 
 he can sell those rails at a profit and invest the 
 gain in a laundry-machine factory the product 
 of which he may, again, not use, but can sell at 
 a profit. 
 
 Capital, then, according to the Socialist, is 
 not the ownership of Use- Values, but is wealth 
 reserved for the making of more wealth that 
 is to be bartered for profit. 
 
 (2) Use- Value 
 
 Use- Values, the capabilities for use inherent 
 in certain things, are of two kinds : 
 
 (a) Those which meet the necessities of 
 man; 
 
 (b) Those which satisfy his desires. 
 
 So much, as a rule, is granted by both Cap- 
 italists and Socialists. In the days of our 
 earliest savagery, they agree, the only Use- 
 Values were, conceivably, those of the former 
 sort, those which met the actual needs of life: 
 food, clothing and shelter. But now — and 
 
34 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 this is the result of our recently noted infinitely 
 varied requirements in a more complex form 
 of society — such a multitude of artificial needs 
 and desires has arisen that anything may be 
 broadly said to have a Use- Value (and that 
 means that the Capitalistic economists would 
 call it Capital — to be denied by the Marx- 
 ians) which meets any general demand, 
 whether that demand is, strictly speaking, as 
 Marx himself points out, for a necessity or for 
 a luxury. By the same token, some things 
 are, of course, in more general need than 
 others, and, say our Capitalists, as those things 
 more in general need are more valuable, the 
 degree of need determines the degree of worth. 
 It is at this point that the Socialist leaps 
 once more into the arena. It is only partly, he 
 says, that the degree of need determines the 
 degree of worth, and his reasons for this dec- 
 laration he lays down in his definition of Ex- 
 change-Value, or the value that an article 
 has on the market, a value, as it will be seen, 
 he maintains, that may be purely artificial, and 
 is itself, as even the Capitalistic economists 
 grant, dependent upon a factor still to be con- 
 sidered. 
 
THE POINT OF DEPARTURE 35 
 
 (3) Exchange-Value 
 
 In the quest after Exchange-Value, it is 
 necessary to return again, for a moment, to 
 our friend, the Primitive Man. It was pos- 
 sible for him to carry on such trade as was 
 requisite to his existence by the simple method 
 of exchange or barter. If it cost him a day's 
 work to make a bow, and if, for some rea- 
 son, he had neither arrows nor the means of 
 making them, he made instead a second bow 
 and took it to a neighbor who had arrows, but 
 no bow, nor the means of making one, and the 
 bow-maker then effected a direct exchange, 
 giving his second bow for as many arrows as 
 could be made in a day, that is, in the time con- 
 sumed for the making of the bow. 
 
 But the growth of human needs and desires 
 and the spread of human industry have made— 
 indeed, long ago made — direct exchange or 
 barter impossible as a general rule for the 
 conduct of trade. It became necessary to 
 invent some medium, some measure or go- 
 betweeni a sort of counter, and this counter 
 or measure — more or less imperfect — we call 
 Money. 
 
 Thus to-day trade is the exchange of com- 
 modities by means of money. If you are a 
 
36 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 shoemaker and want a watch, what you ac- 
 tually do is to exchange a certain number of 
 your shoes for that watch. But you do not do 
 this directly. Instead, you sell as many pairs of 
 shoes as will bring you enough money to buy 
 the watch, and that money you take to the 
 watchmaker, and receive from him a time- 
 piece in exchange, he, it is possible, ultimately 
 using the same money for the purchase of 
 several shoes of your manufacture. 
 
 It is then necessary, according to the Social- 
 ist, to remember, what many authors forget, 
 that Price and Value are two distinct economic 
 entities. 
 
 Price is a creation of our modern economic 
 system. When mankind lived under another 
 system, and one article was directly exchanged 
 for another, there was, of course, such a thing 
 as Value, but there was no such thing as Price. 
 Now, however, direct exchange and barter 
 having almost completely disappeared — hav- 
 ing become under the modern regime prac- 
 tically impossible — we must, as we have just 
 seen, exchange through a medium — ^must ex- 
 change two commodities by means of a rela- 
 tively stable third commodity in the terms of 
 which third commodity we may measure the 
 values of the first two. That is why in the 
 
THE POINT OF DEPARTURE 37 
 
 terms of money we now measure the values of 
 commodities for exchange. Gold, or the Gov- 
 ernment's promise to pay gold, as on a Treas- 
 ury-note, has been generally chosen for money ; 
 because gold is about as stable as any com- 
 modity can be, though as a commodity it some- 
 times shifts in value, and though the possible 
 discovery of great deposits of the metal would, 
 as was shown in Edwin LeFevre's brilliant 
 burlesque, " The Golden Flood," bring the 
 value of gold to almost zero. Be that as it 
 may. Price is thus, the Socialist declares, not 
 Value, but the measure of Value. Value, he 
 admits, fluctuates, but not so much as money 
 itself, and Price, he concludes, may be arbi- 
 trarily modified by monopolies and " corners " 
 until it is not even a true measure. 
 
 On the Capitalistic side, Lord Lauderdale 
 long ago formulated the theory that Value de- 
 pends upon the relation of supply to demand : 
 over-supply, he pointed out, results in de- 
 creased prices; under-supply in increased 
 prices. True, answers the Marxian, but de- 
 creased demand results in decreased produc- 
 tion and a return to normal prices; whereas, 
 increased demand results in increased produc- 
 tion and the same return: the adjustment is 
 automatic, and Price, does tend at least to ap- 
 
38 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 proximate Value, real Value remaining un- 
 changed.* 
 
 What is it, then, that determines Value? 
 We have seen that when a Use-Value is of- 
 fered on the market for barter — that is, for the 
 money-value involved in the barter — a new 
 value comes up for consideration, a value 
 that is known as Exchange-Value. Other- 
 wise, in brief, if the general need for the two 
 articles were equal, one pair of the shoe- 
 maker's boots would exchange for one watch. 
 This brings us to the factor of Labor. 
 
 (4) Labor 
 
 In treating of the influence of Labor upon 
 Price, or Exchange-Value, the Capitalistic 
 economists agree, for the most part, that 
 this influence is exerted in the matter of 
 quantity — the quantity of labor involved in the 
 production of the article. " Labor," says 
 Adam Smith in the quotation at the head of 
 this chapter, " labor was the first price, the 
 original purchase-money that was paid for all 
 things." Our Primitive Man, you will remem- 
 ber, traded vtoi one bow for one arrow, but one 
 bow for as many arrows as were made in the 
 
 * John Spargo, " Socialism." 
 
THE POINT OF DEPARTURE 39 
 
 time that it took to make the bow, time being 
 the measure of the quantity of labor. And 
 Adam Smith continues: 
 
 " If among a nation of hunters ... it 
 usually cost twice the labor to kill a beaver 
 which it does to kill a d€;er, one beaver would 
 naturally be worth or exchange for two deer. 
 It is natural that what is usually the produce 
 of two days' or two hours' labor, should be 
 worth double what is usually the produce of 
 one day's or one hour's labor." * 
 
 But, argue the elder economists, a certain 
 qualification must be made to the theory that 
 the Exchange- Value of an article is affected by 
 the quantity of labor embodied in its produc- 
 tion. For if the qiiantity of labor embodied 
 in its production affects individually the Ex- 
 change-Value of the article, then the product 
 of a workman who is slow because he is stupid 
 or lazy, but who eventually turns out a perfect 
 article^ would receive an advance of price 
 equal to, if not greater than, that received by 
 the product of a first-rate workman who, by 
 reason of wit and energy, turns out good prod- 
 uct of the same sort in less time; hence, one 
 day's work by an unskilled laborer would, in 
 this respect, be equal in value to one day's 
 
 ♦"Wealth of Nations." 
 
40 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 work by a trained artificer — and that is mani- 
 festly absurd. The Capitalistic economists, 
 therefore, modify the broad rule and say that 
 the Exchange- Value of an article is affected 
 by the average quantity of labor necessary for 
 its production. 
 
 This is the axiom now generally accepted 
 by writers of the Capitalistic class, but it is only 
 fair to say that it is not accepted by them all. 
 That Use- Values are Capital; that they are at 
 any rate the stuff of which Capital is made, the 
 component parts, the raw-material of Capital 
 — this, one repeats, is the general view. But 
 the dissenters among the Capitalistic econo- 
 mists discard that view, and would thereby 
 minimize the influence of Labor upon Ex- 
 change-Values. According to them, Capital 
 can exist independently of Labor; they point 
 to a sheaf of wheat and a flock of sheep in 
 proof of this, and they regard Labor as in some 
 sort the pensioner of Capital. 
 
 To this the Socialist enters flat denial. 
 There is, he declares, no conceivable form of 
 Capital that is not dependent upon Labor.* 
 
 * " If a man can bring to London an ounce of silver 
 (or the equivalent of five shillings) out of the earth 
 of Peru in the same time that he can produce a bushel 
 of corn, then one is the natural price of the other ; now, 
 
THE POINT OF DEPARTURE 41 
 
 When one says to him : " Use-Values are 
 Capital, or the stuff of which Capital is 
 made; why split hairs between what is poten- 
 tially and what is actually ? " — ^he replies : 
 " This book is merely a combination of certain 
 Use-Values — it is merely paper, ink, type, 
 cloth, glue and thread ; but the paper, ink, type, 
 cloth, glue and thread of which it is made are 
 not the book until they have been properly co- 
 ordinated and used — until their Use-Values 
 have been put to their proper uses by Labor." 
 Wheat, unless cared for by Labor, says the 
 Socialist, will grow wild and wax useless, nor, 
 when properly grown, can it be made into food 
 without Labor. Sheep, untended by Labor, 
 will deteriorate, and nothing but Labor can 
 convert them into food. It is the Labor in the 
 shoemaker's shoes that, he says, decides — 
 just how he will presently demonstrate — the 
 number of pairs which must go to make up the 
 value of the Labor in the watchmaker's time- 
 
 if by reason of new and more easy mines a man can 
 get two ounces of silver as easily as formerly he did 
 one, then the corn will be as cheap at ten shillings a 
 bushel as it was before at five." — Sir William Petty, A 
 Treatise on Taxes and Constitutions, (1662). See also 
 Benjamin Franklin, Remarks and Facts Relative to 
 American Paper Money, (1764): "The value of all 
 things is most justly measured by labor," 
 
42 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 piece that he wants to buy with his profit upon 
 those shoes. Labor is thus the force that fixes 
 the law of exchange. 
 
 But whereby, it may well be asked, is to be 
 known the Labor in the shoes and the watch 
 respectively? As inventions progress and 
 tools are improved, these amounts change: 
 what is it that brings about the progress of in- 
 vention and the improvement of tools ? Com- 
 petition, is the answer of the Socialist : the de- 
 mand for more watches and shoes for purposes 
 of exchange. 
 
 To return now to our major theme. We 
 have seen that the majority of Capitalistic 
 economists hold that it is the average quantity 
 of Labor that affects the Exchange-Value of 
 commodities, but here the Socialist goes a step 
 beyond his Capitalistic brother. Labor, ac- 
 cording to the Socialist, is qualitative as well 
 as quantitative. ' We must take into account, 
 he insists, not only the time which a skilled 
 worker expends in the making of a given arti- 
 cle, but also the time which he has previously 
 spent in the perfect learning of his trade, for 
 that time, when he comes to a regular practice 
 of that trade, may well make one day of labor 
 by him equal to two days' labor upon a simi- 
 lar article by an untrained workman. In 
 
THE POINT OF DEPARTURE 43 
 
 other words, says the Marxian, we must 
 reckon the Social-Labor involved : the labor 
 best suited to the satisfaction of the social or 
 general demand for the creation of the arti- 
 cle in question; or, to put it in still another 
 shape : the Social-Labor- Value is the rul- 
 ing amount of time and labor obtaining at 
 that period of history for the production 
 of the best commercial type of a specific 
 article. 
 
 To my mind, this phase of our subject has 
 been best presented, from the Socialist's point 
 of view, by John Spargo in a lucid chapter up- 
 on the economics of Socialism. " The real law 
 of value," says Mr. Spargo, " is that the value 
 of commodities is determined by the amount of 
 abstract labor embodied in them, or . . . 
 by the amount of social human labor necessary, 
 on the average, for their production. . . . 
 Two workmen set to work each to make a 
 table. When finished the tables are in all re- 
 spects alike, so that it is impossible to distin- 
 guish between them. One of the workmen, 
 however, takes twice as long as the other to 
 make his table. He works with clumsy, old- 
 fashioned tools and methods, sawing his 
 boards by hand from heavy lumber, and so on. 
 The other workman uses superior modern 
 
44 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 tools and methods, his boards are sawn and 
 planed by machinery and all the economies of 
 production are used. The amount of labor, 
 not only individual labor, but social labor, ex- 
 pended in the production of one table, is twice 
 as great as in the other. Now, always assum- 
 ing that their use-values are equal, no one will 
 be willing to pay twice as much for one table 
 as for the other. If the more economical 
 methods of production are those usually 
 adopted in the manufacture of tables, then the 
 average value of tables will be determined 
 thereby, and tables produced by the slower, 
 less economical process, will naturally com- 
 mand only the same price in the market. If 
 we reverse the order of this proposition, and 
 suppose the slower, less economical methods to 
 be those generally prevailing in the manufac- 
 ture of tables, and the quicker, more economi- 
 cal methods to be exceptional, then, all other 
 things being equal, the exchange-value of ta- 
 bles will be determined by the amount of labor 
 commonly consumed, and the fortunate pro- 
 ducer who adopts the exceptional, economical 
 methods will, for a time, reap a golden harvest. 
 Only for a time, however. As the new methods 
 prevail, competition being the impelling force, 
 they become less exceptional, and finally, the 
 
THE POINT OF DEPARTURE 45 
 
 regular, normal niethods of production and the 
 standards of value." * 
 
 It is evident from this that, in the Socialist's 
 view. Competition decides the amount of So- 
 cial Labor to be employed in the manufacture 
 of a given article. If a given article is made 
 by slow and crude methods, which are always 
 expensive, and some workman, a competitor, 
 appears and devises a means of making that 
 article more swiftly and more skillfully, which 
 means more cheaply, then, very soon, he will 
 undersell the men using the old, crude and ex- 
 pensive methods, and those men will be forced 
 to adopt the methods of the newcomer, thus 
 changing the Labor- Value of the article to the 
 standard set by the competitor. 
 
 With this exception in mind, we may now 
 clearly understand the Socialist's definition of 
 the efifect of Labor upon Exchange-Value. 
 The Capitalistic economist declares that the 
 average quantity of Labor affects the Ex- 
 change-Values of commodities; the Socialistic 
 economist declares, again to quote Mr. Spargo, 
 that " the exchange value of commodities is 
 determined by the amount of average labor at 
 the time socially necessary for their production, 
 . . . not absolutely in individual cases, but 
 * John Spargo, " Socialism." 
 
46 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 approximately in general by the bargaining and 
 higgling of the market." 
 
 This is the final parting of the ways be- 
 tween the two schools. Hitherto their paths 
 have been sometimes the same, sometimes 
 more or less parallel, and always departed 
 merely to return. But now they part never 
 to meet again, and that parting is made by 
 the Socialist's development of his theory of 
 Labor. 
 
 For Labor, in the dictionary of Socialism, is 
 a commodity. Just as money, the modern me- 
 dium or measure of exchange for two given 
 commodities, is itself a commodity, so also is 
 this Labor, which^ the Marxian insists, is the 
 fundamental determining power of value. 
 
 Labor as labor has no value. One may spend 
 his days in building something that he passfes 
 his nights in destroying; Penelope wove her 
 web only to unweave it; in both cases the labor 
 is without worth. Green organizes an in- 
 dustry, builds a factory and secures men to 
 operate the machines in that factory; but what 
 he secures, or hires, or buys, is not Labor in 
 the abstract, but the power and will to labor, 
 whether by time, so paid, or by piece-work, 
 the result of which latter contract is a result 
 embodying labor-power. As Mr. Spargo well 
 
THE POINT OF DEPARTURE 47 
 
 says : " Labor-power is a commodity and 
 wages is its price." 
 
 Now, continues the Socialist, Labor being 
 a commodity, it is subservient to the conditions 
 that govern its sister commodities. Wages, 
 its price, rise and decline, as do the prices of 
 other commodities, and the price of Labor ob- 
 serves to Labor the same relation that is ob- 
 served by the prices of other commodities to 
 those commodities. Monopoly can thus create 
 artificial labor-values, as it creates artificial 
 coal or beef values, and to the excess of supply, 
 as well as to that of demand. Labor, like every 
 other commodity, is amenable. The only cer- 
 tain thing about Labor and wages is the only 
 certain thing about other commodities and their 
 prices : that price for one as for the other will 
 tend to approximate value. 
 
 To state the case more fully: since the rul- 
 ing amount of time and labor obtaining at the 
 period for the production of the best commer- 
 cial type of a given article — that is, since its 
 Social-Labor-Value — determines, under the 
 influence of competition, the Exchange- Value 
 of that article, so Labor, or labor-power, an- 
 other commodity, depends upon the ruling 
 amount of time and labor obtaining at that 
 period for the production thereof — upon the 
 
48 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 current standard of efficiency, under the influ- 
 ence of competition, plus the power of the em- 
 ployer. The price of this particular commod- 
 ity is about the cost of the support of a la- 
 borer and his family — the latter being included 
 because it is economically necessary to rear 
 more laborers to fill the ranks — and though 
 monopoly may force wages down and trades- 
 unions may force them up, these conditions 
 are subject to the same automatic adjustment 
 that we have seen prevailing, so the Social- 
 ist thinks, in the matter of supply and demand 
 as related to Price. 
 
 There is, however, as you may have noticed 
 in the above exposition, one point wherein la- 
 bor-power differs from other commodities: it 
 must constantly be renewed. The worker, un- 
 like such commodities as pig-iron and bricks, 
 but not at all unlike such commodities as sheep 
 and steers, must have food, clothing and a 
 home in order to make him useful — and at 
 that he must eventually die. Death being a 
 factor, food, clothing and a home must also be 
 provided for his family, in order that future 
 workers may be raised up to take his place 
 and maintain the supply of labor-power. And 
 again : whereas other commodities, in raw 
 material form, are as a rule utterly consumed 
 
THE POIKT OF DEPARTURE 49 
 
 in the creation of Ex>. .ange- Values, this labor- 
 power creates fresh vaiies in the course of its 
 work and lives on to creaue still more. 
 
 Herein lies the doctrine ^ "The Surplus 
 Value " to which I referred in Chapter I. It is 
 well to repeat now the explanation ; ' /en there : 
 
 " In the SociaHst's view, under st y as at 
 present organized, A owns the too. B has 
 the necessity to use those tools, and A pays B 
 wages for the time B spends in working^with 
 the tools, A meanwhile keeping the arriple 
 that B produced with A's tools and selllV 
 this article for a price which will reimburse A 
 for the wages paid B, and for the permission 
 given B to use the tools, and still leave a profit 
 that A puts into his own purse. 
 
 " Now, says the Socialist, between the own- 
 ership of those tools in the first instance and 
 the use of those tools in the second, something 
 was produced that could be sold for more 
 money — was of more value — than A, the 
 owner, expended. That something, that sur- 
 plus value, the Socialist contends, was created 
 not by A, the owner of the tools — he was paid 
 for his ownership out of the primary profit — 
 but by B, who used the tools, and the profit 
 therefore should go not to A, but to B. The 
 Socialist g;;ants that A may be rewarded for 
 
so WHAT IS SOCi/lISM? 
 
 his ownership and foryrtie opportunity pro- 
 vided B, but he maiiytains that B should be 
 rewarded for his tinzie and should rei^eive that 
 ' Surplus Value ' -//hich he has created." 
 
 This is the ro'Jt of the essential antagonism 
 that the Socig^fist discovers between employer 
 and employ^'. In this creation by the commod- 
 ity of lafbor-power of fresh values — surplus 
 valuesy^and in that commodity's power to con- 
 tinue/so to create such values so long as the 
 pcMwer lives — in that. rests the belief that the 
 employer, or capitalist, by getting possession 
 of the surplus value without paying for it, 
 makes his profit, gets something for nothing, 
 something over and above the wages of the 
 worker and the price of the worker's food and 
 clothing and housing, over and above the rental 
 on the machine, the wear and tear, and, so 
 getting, perpetuates his power. 
 
 Of course, the Socialist is not so foolish as 
 to pretend that all the surplus value goes into 
 the pocket of the direct employer. That oc- 
 curs only when the direct employer is the 
 owner of all the capital invested in his busi' 
 ness or factory, but it does go — whether in 
 dividends to stockholders, or rent for build- 
 ings, or interest upon mortgages — to Capital 
 as a class, says the Marxian, as opposed to 
 
THE POINT OF DEPARTURE 51 
 
 Labor as a class, and so Capital exploits La- 
 bor and, by exploiting it, by getting from it 
 that something for nothing, turns Labor- 
 created wealth into the purse of Capital and 
 establishes the Capitalistic class-sovereignty. 
 The only way out of this opposition of inter- 
 ests, this Class Struggle, that the Socialist 
 can see, is " the socialization of the means of 
 production and exchange," the Social Revolu- 
 tion, the turning over of the industrial scheme 
 in such manner that the machines, both singly 
 as pieces of machinery and wholly as a system, 
 now owned by the few for the profit of the 
 few, shall be acquired and operated by the 
 majority for the benefit of all. 
 
 (5) Pront 
 
 By such a seemingly circuitous road, we 
 now come at last to the end of our pres- 
 ent inquiry, to the problem of Profit. How 
 does the Capitalist, the possessor of Capital, 
 make more Capital therefrom? The Social- 
 ist's answer we have just indicated. The an- 
 swers of the Capitalistic economists are four in 
 number : 
 
 (a) Profit is the result of cheap purchase 
 and dear sale. 
 
52 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 (b) It is the wages of executive ability. 
 
 (c) It is the employer's just return for the 
 risk that he runs in making his initial invest- 
 ment. 
 
 (d) It is his proper reward for early ab- 
 stinence, for the Capitalist's hoarding of his 
 wealth until he had accumulated enough to use 
 it in the employment of Labor for the creation 
 of more wealth for himself. 
 
 (a) The first of these explanations pos- 
 sesses the virtue of apparent simplicity. The 
 United States Steel Corporation gets word that 
 the Baldwin Locomotive Company has re- 
 ceived a " rush order " for an unusual number 
 of locomotive-engines, and that the company 
 is unable to secure the steel needed for the 
 work with that speed which the order requires. 
 The corporation, with their control of the pro- 
 duction of steel and their established facilities 
 for turning out that commodity at short notice, 
 produce by purchase — i.e., by the purchase of 
 labor-power in their many mills — the supply 
 needed by the locomotive company, paying 
 therefor the relatively low price upon which 
 these same facilities make it possible for the 
 corporation to insist. They then seek the 
 Baldwins and, by reason of the low price that 
 
THE POINT OF DEPARTURE 53 
 
 they have commanded — and also by reason of 
 the pressing need of the Baldwins — force the 
 latter to pay them a sum considerably in ex- 
 cess of that which they, the corporation, have 
 expended. The difference between what the 
 corporation paid for the production of the 
 steel and what the company paid the corpora- 
 tion for that steel is the corporation's Profit, 
 the joint result of the corporation's facilities 
 and monopoly and the peculiar needs of the 
 locomotive-builders: Profit is the result of 
 cheap purchase and dear sale. 
 
 True as to individuals, says the Socialist, 
 but false as to classes. The steel corporation 
 gains over the Baldwins if it sells them steel at 
 more than the steel cost the corporation — the 
 one gains and the other loses — ^but both parties, 
 in order thus to meet in the market, must 
 be employers, must be members of the Cap- 
 italistic class. Consequently, though one Cap- 
 italist gains and the other loses, the Capitalistic 
 class, as a class, is just where it was before the 
 transaction occurred. Both the corporation 
 and the company, according to the Socialist, 
 have secured their articles of exchange, their 
 commodities — ^the commodity of cheap steel on 
 the one hand and the commodity of cheap 
 money to pay for that steel on the other-^ 
 
54 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 through their appropriation of the surplus- 
 value created by their respective laborers, and 
 so, the Marxians assert, whoever among the 
 Capitalists win, the workingmen lose. 
 
 (b) That Profit is the wages of executive 
 ability the Capitalistic economists seek to dem- 
 onstrate in somewhat this fashion: Green 
 has organized an industry and built a factory. 
 He has secured the services of men to operate 
 the, machines in that factory, and he pays these 
 men wages for their labor at those machines. 
 To eliminate waste and to increase speed of 
 . production, it is, however, necessary to divide 
 the laborers and their labor into various de- 
 partments, and to have at the head of each de- 
 partment a trustworthy and competent over- 
 seer, or foreman, so that Green secures the 
 services of other men — other workmen,, for 
 they are doing work — ^to operate the depart- 
 ments, and these men also are paid wages. 
 Finally, by the same course of reasoning, 
 Green himself must become a workman and — 
 as he who organized the industry and built the 
 factory best knows how to do — ^must manage 
 the corps of overseers, foremen, or depart- 
 ment-heads, and should receive wages there- 
 for. But Green simply takes as his wages the 
 profits of the factory. These are the proper 
 
THE POINT OF DEPARTURE 55 
 
 reward due this man of executive ability for 
 his superintendence of the labor and the la- 
 borers: Wages and Profit are really the same 
 thing; the Capitalist is a workman and his 
 wages for the work that he does are the profits 
 he receives: ProUt is the wages of executive 
 ability. 
 
 Here, in controversion, the Socialist appeals 
 to facts. Nearly all our industries, he replies, 
 are managed not by those who receive the 
 profits from them, but by other employes who 
 work for a form of wages that it is sought to 
 dignify by the name of " salary " — employes 
 who work just as the other laborers do — and 
 the profits are divided between large and scat- 
 tered groups of shareholders who never did and 
 never can do anything toward the progress of 
 the industry, either in the way of labor or of 
 the superintendence and direction of labor. 
 Profit is not the wages of executive ability, 
 because the executives do not receive the prof- 
 its, and because those who do receive the prof- 
 its are not and cannot be executives. 
 
 (c) Then what, retort the Capitalistic econ- 
 omists, about the risk that the Capitalist has 
 run in making his initial investment? It will 
 not be denied that he has run some risk in 
 the organization of his industry and the erec- 
 
56 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 tion of his factory. He has had to invest 
 money in the enterprise, and there has been a 
 danger that he would lose that money. The 
 men under him — whether department-heads or 
 machine-hands — have not invested anything, 
 have simply accepted the chance to work that 
 Green gave them, have merely taken his prof- 
 fered wages. It is surely obvious that not they, 
 who have run no risk, but Green, who has 
 run a risk, should get the return for that risk, 
 and that return Green receives in the profits, 
 or, if you will, in that share of the profits which 
 goes to him: Profit is the employer's just re- 
 turn for the risk that he runs in making his 
 initial investment. 
 
 The Socialist, however, denies the premises 
 of this argument. The laborer, he says, does 
 make an investment, the investment of all that 
 he has in the world: his labor-power. And 
 the laborer always runs the same risk that is 
 run by the employer, and often another and a 
 greater risk. Like the employer, the laborer 
 will lose upon his investment if the industry 
 does not succeed, but, unlike the employer, he 
 may very well lose his life in his work at the 
 machines whether the industry advances or re- 
 treats. What, then, asks the Marxian, is the 
 just return for the risk run by the laborer ? Is 
 
THE POINT OF DEPARTURE 57 
 
 it paid him in his wages? No, because wages 
 are not highest in those sorts of toil where the 
 risks of financial failure are largest, are not 
 highest in those forms of labor that embody 
 the gravest danger to life, to limb, to health. 
 But, concludes the Socialist, let us grant, for the 
 sake of some basis of agreement, that the wages 
 do pay the workman for his share of risk : the 
 fact still remains that the " just return " for 
 the risk of both the employer and the employe is 
 drawn directly from the surplus value created 
 not by the employer, hut by the employe. 
 
 (d) Lastly, we have the question of how 
 Green got the money to organize and to build. 
 Clearly, he did not get it by spending it. He 
 saved; he set aside portions of his early salary, 
 income, gains in other enterprises; he did this 
 with some such end in view as he has now at- 
 tained, and, as a result of that saving, as its 
 proper reward — so believe many Capitalistic 
 economists — he now secures the profits on his 
 factory : Profit is the proper reward for early 
 abstinence, for the Capitalist's hoarding of his 
 wealth until he has accumulated enough to use 
 it in the employment of labor for the creation 
 of more wealth for himself. 
 
 That, according to the Socialist, is the most 
 myopic argument of the four. It means, in 
 
58 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 plain terms, says he, that mere saving — indi- 
 rectly, perhaps, but none the less actually — 
 creates profit. But saving, he insists, cannot 
 create anything: saving is simply a process of 
 setting aside the values that have been previ- 
 ously created, as all values are created, by La- 
 bor, and it can be made greater only by the 
 further hiring therewith of more Labor to 
 create more values. The Capitalist's process 
 of saving does not deserve reward, because it 
 is only the storing up by him of Labor-made 
 values, and no amount of savings will produce 
 Profit until those savings themselves have been 
 used for the employment of Labor, until Labor 
 has turned them into Profit. 
 
 To sum up now the result of our inquiries, 
 and to chance, for the sake of clarity, a perhaps 
 tiresome repetition, we have seen that, accord- 
 ing to the major political economists of Cap- 
 italisrn : 
 
 ( 1 ) Capital is the ownership of Use-Values. 
 
 (2) Use-Value is determined in part by the 
 general need or desire for the article having 
 such a value, and in part by its Exchange- 
 Value. 
 
 (3) Exchange-Value is a Use-Value's meas- 
 ure of exchange in the market. 
 
THE POINT OF DEPARTURE 59 
 
 (4) Labor fixes Exchange-Value, the Ex- 
 change- Vahie of an article being the expression 
 of the average of Labor necessary for its 
 production. 
 
 (5) Profit is to the possession of a Capital 
 that is (a) the result of his cheap purchase and 
 dear sale; (b) the wages of his executive abil- 
 ity; (c) the just return for the risk that he 
 ran in making his initial investment; or (d) the 
 proper reward for his early abstinence, for the 
 hoarding of his wealth until he had accumu- 
 lated enough to use it in the employment of La- 
 bor for the creation of more wealth for him- 
 self. 
 
 On the other hand, the Socialists hold : 
 (i) That the unit of wealth in a Capital- 
 istic society is a Commodity, an article that 
 possesses the ability to satisfy some human 
 need or desire so general as to make that ar- 
 ticle exchangeable for other articles possessing 
 a similar ability to satisfy a similar — but not, 
 of course, the same — need or desire, an article, 
 that is, which must have a Social-Use- Value. 
 
 (2) That Capital is the ownership of 
 Wealth (i.e., of Commodities) reserved for 
 the making of more wealth, which is in turn to 
 be bartered for Profit. 
 
 (3) That Use-Values, both (a) those which 
 
6o WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 meet the necessities of man, and (b) those 
 which satisfy his desires, are measured by Ex- 
 change-Values. 
 
 (4) That Exchange-Values are the price 
 of Use- Values in the market, the artificial 
 measure — in terms of the commodity, Money 
 — of the Use-Values for the purposes of 
 barter, Price tending to approximate Value, 
 but real Value remaining unchanged. 
 
 (5) That Labor creates all commodities 
 and Exchange- Values, the Exchange- Value of 
 a commodity being determined by the average 
 amount of Labor at the time socially neces- 
 sary for its production; that Labor therefore 
 creates all wealth, all Capital, and that it itself 
 is a commodity, subject to the laws governing 
 all other commodities, with this difference: 
 that it must constantly be renewed and that, 
 whereas the other commodities, in raw mate- 
 rial form, are as a rule utterly consumed in the 
 creation of Exchange- Values, Labor, or la- 
 bor-power, creates fresh values in the course 
 of its use and, for a time, lives on to create 
 more. 
 
 (6) That Labor, using the tools provided by 
 Capital, produces what is generally known as 
 Profit, but what is actually a Surplus Value, 
 which can be sold for more than Capital, in 
 
THE POINT OF DEPARTURE 6i 
 
 providing the tools, has earned; and that Cap- 
 ital, by getting that something for nothing, by 
 pocketing that Labor-created and Labor- 
 earned Profit, exploits Labor and establishes 
 Capitalistic class-sovereignty. 
 
 (7) That the only way out of this opposition 
 of interests, this Class Struggle, lies through the 
 Social Revolution, the turning-over of the in- 
 dustrial scheme in such a manner that the ma- 
 chines, both singly as pieces of machinery and 
 wholly as a system, now owned by the few for 
 the profit of the few, shall be acquired and 
 operated by the majority for the benefit of all. 
 
Ill 
 
 THE ASCENT OF MAN 
 
 "Who are the fittest to survive, those who are con- 
 tinually at war with each other, or those who support 
 one another? " 
 — Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid a Factor of Evolution. 
 
 I HAVE said that Socialism, though express- 
 ing itself politically, is an economic force, and 
 I have sketched, roughly, the fundamental 
 principles of its economy. Do not suppose, 
 however, that the dyed-in-the-wool Socialist 
 stops there. He has not been content until 
 he has sought to discover a reason for his be- 
 ing; he has reconstructed his entire cosmos in 
 the terms of his own ideals, and the net con- 
 sequence is a philosophy that embraces the 
 whole body of art and morality — embraces, 
 indeed, all history and all life — and attempts 
 an expression in terms peculiar to itself.* The 
 
 * " It may be convenient for Socialists, with a view to 
 election expediency, to seek to confine the definition of 
 Socialism to the economic issue abstracted from all the 
 62 
 
THE ASCENT OF MAN 63 
 
 Socialist, as was indicated by my quotation 
 from the New York Nation in our first 
 chapter, will tell you that his political economy 
 is the result of this philosophy, and that the 
 philosophy is not the result of his economics. 
 
 This philosophy passes current among So- 
 cialists under the somewhat forbidding, and 
 it seems to me inaccurate, term : " Material- 
 istic Conception of History." It is a philos- 
 ophy based upon an eclectic view of the prog- 
 ress of the human race, and, as it covers the 
 full fabric of Socialistic thought, an under- 
 standing of it is necessary to an understanding 
 of Socialism. Pursuing, then, our former 
 methods, let us first consider the points of view 
 of the opposing school. 
 
 Until a time almost recent, all history writ- 
 ing was a literary art rather than a philosophic 
 science. The man that practised it had an 
 eye only for the brilliant, the obvious, the spec- 
 tacular. The organ notes of Gibbon, the 
 stately march of Macaulay, the symphonic 
 
 other issues of life and conduct. But the attempt to 
 limit the term Socialism within the four walls of an 
 economic definition is, in the long run, futile. Such a 
 limitation is justified neither by historic knowledge 
 nor ... by the implications involved in the economic 
 change itself." — Ernest Belfort Bax, Essays in 
 Socialism. 
 
64 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 paragraphs of Froude — not to mention the 
 birdlike twitterings of the French Memoirists 
 — were all attuned to what these artists con- 
 sidered the key of greatness. They dealt with 
 emperors and kings, and they saw the fall of 
 Troy in the adultery of Helen, and the French 
 Revolution in the coquetry of the Pompadour. 
 Their pages — intensely interesting as they are, 
 considered simply as the moving records of 
 certain human lives — concern themselves, in the 
 last analysis, only with the sins of the rulers 
 and scarcely ever, if at all, with the sufferings 
 of the people, which those sins sometimes 
 caused, but of which they were, according to 
 the true Socialist, far oftener the effect. His- 
 tory, in a word, was a chronique scandaleuse, 
 or, at best, the story of battles fought and 
 treaties made, not so much between nations as 
 between the individuals who, it was supposed, 
 governed, by the chance of birth, those nations' 
 destinies. 
 
 That was the eldest view of the subject. But 
 soon upon it — as, whether for good or ill, he 
 cast new light upon every topic toward which 
 he directed his mind — Carlyle shed a fresh 
 illumination. The American Revolution, the 
 overthrow of the monarchy in France had 
 marked the consummation of that discovery 
 
THE ASCENT OF MAN 65 
 
 of which the Reformation and the fall of the 
 Stuarts had evidenced the beginning : mankind 
 had found the individual, and Carlyle, applying 
 that discovery to history, declared that history 
 was made not by persons of high rank, but 
 by persons who ranked high ; that, in short, the 
 narrative of mankind is only the narrative of 
 great men. 
 
 Upon that precept, the bulk of at least the 
 popular historians are even now proceeding. 
 It is surely the precept around which are con- 
 structed the text-book histories of our public 
 schools, and it therefore continues to dominate 
 the idea of history in the minds of the average 
 American. 
 
 But when Charles Darwin formulated the 
 law of evolution, he influenced profoundly all 
 the thought and activity of those animals that 
 we flatter with the title of human beings. Men 
 began to see that the beautiful theory of human 
 brotherhood has a certain foundation of sound, 
 scientific fact, and, that thought once implanted 
 in their minds, they came naturally to ask 
 whether the rulers of men had quite so much 
 to do with the destinies of man as did Man, 
 the race, the people, who, in the final definition, 
 created the rulers. 
 
 That seed began immediately to grow. We 
 
66 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 had already well seen that the hereditary mon- 
 arch — ^the mere distant descendant of a strong 
 man — was by no means a history-maker per se, 
 but was most often dependent upon the strong 
 men whom he was forced to raise up for the 
 conduct of his country. It followed naturally 
 that we next wanted to know whether even 
 those strong men who were thus raised up, 
 or who raised themselves, were not, in their 
 turn, the inevitable product of conditions, the 
 logical result of their environment — and 
 whether, if these men were thus the best men 
 of their time for the expression of their time, 
 all the history that they made was not, there- 
 fore, the effect of which the state of the masses, 
 the then present economic lot of the people, 
 was the primary cause. It is to these two 
 questions that the newest school of historians 
 has replied in the affirmative and has thus 
 started what it sincerely believes to be the genu- 
 ine Science of History. 
 
 To state the matter more simply, there 
 have been three leading conceptions of his- 
 tory: 
 
 (i) That history is the story of hereditary 
 rulers and great wars — a conception nowadays 
 only rarely entertained, but crystalized in those 
 interesting and masterly written volumes. 
 
THE ASCENT OF MAN 67 
 
 which still, as classics, deserve their places upon 
 our bookshelves. 
 
 (2) That history is the story of men of 
 greatness, whether born to greatness or them- 
 selves achieving it — a conception still enter- 
 tained by the average writer of pviblic school 
 text-books and popular histories. 
 
 (3) That history is the story of the great- 
 ness of the people as a mass, of their changing 
 economic conditions, and of how those condi- 
 tions and their changes, acting through the 
 masses, and upon the leaders, sent armies to 
 war and signed treaties of peace, made and 
 unmade generals and ministers, raised up and 
 tore down emperors and kings — a conception 
 ably employed by the modern scientific his- 
 torians, by such writers as John Richard Green 
 and John Bach McMaster. 
 
 It will be seen, of course, that these writers 
 are also philosophers. Not content to chron- 
 icle facts alone, they seek always for the causes 
 of those facts. In their view, life may be 
 defined as existence in a perpetual condition 
 of change, and any period of time as but a 
 point upon a line. It does not suffice them 
 to record the truth that cannibalism was in 
 one age a religious duty and, in another, an 
 abhorred practice, It is not enough for them 
 
68 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 merely to declare that, in the same age, it is 
 wrong for the New Yorker to be living with 
 more than one wife while the harem is a laud- 
 able institution in the hands of the respectable 
 citizen of Constantinople. They do not stop 
 when they have pointed out that Oriental mod- 
 esty hides the face and discloses the breasts 
 of its women whereas its Occidental equivalent 
 reverses the process. They want to know why 
 these things are so, and if you reply to them 
 on the one hand that the reason is a mystery, 
 their answer is that science cannot tolerate a 
 mystery; or if, on the other hand, you solve 
 the riddle with the one word " Custom," their 
 response is but another question : " Why the 
 custom ? " 
 
 These men, not themselves Socialists, have 
 furnished the Socialist with much of that am- 
 munition which he discharges in the broadside 
 that he calls the " MateriaHstic Conception of 
 History." They have shown, as we have just 
 seen, that the story of the race is the story of 
 the masses, and that the masses have owed 
 their condition to their environment. The So- 
 cialist, developing this theory, boldly declares 
 that all environment is the result of economic 
 forces. Napoleon once said that an army 
 travels upon its belly; in the same manner, 
 
THE ASCENT OF MAN 69 
 
 announces the Socialist, has traveled, does 
 travel, and must forever continue to travel the 
 great army of mankind. Upon food, clothing 
 and shelter — or at any rate upon the means 
 of the production and exchange of these primal 
 necessities — is founded, in his theory, the great 
 structure of Social Evolution. We shall see, 
 in a few moments, how he applies this prin- 
 ciple in an attempt to demonstrate the inevita- 
 ble arrival of the Socialistic State; but we must 
 pause here to qualify, at least to some extent, 
 the term that he has given to his theory. 
 
 Such a qualification is necessary in the in- 
 terests of the Socialist himself. The plain 
 truth is that his phrase does not describe his 
 principle. To the average mind, " The Ma- 
 terialistic Conception of History " conveys one 
 of two meanings : it is either a conception of 
 history that denies the action of God upon the 
 affairs of men and refuses to admit the higher 
 emotions as forces in the progress of the race, 
 or else it is a conception of history that em- 
 bodies a sort of fatalistic determinism, a theory 
 that rests upon the slow working-out of long, 
 natural laws and provides no goad to individual 
 effort. 
 
 As a matter of fact, these two definitions 
 are still very frequently urged as arguments 
 
70 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 against Socialism, but it is only fair to Social- 
 ism to say that neither of them is accurate. 
 The Socialist begins his conception of history 
 with the first turning of the wheel on the car 
 of evolution, and what power it was that set 
 this car in motion — ^whether it was the blind 
 forces of the atheist's ideal or the conscious 
 act of the Christian's God — ^he leaves each of 
 us free to determine according to our several 
 theologies : the Socialist sees so much to do 
 now upon this earth that he finds very little 
 time to speculate upon what once happened 
 in some sphere celestial; he is too busy with 
 here-and-now to think greatly about there-and- 
 then. 
 
 As for the other objection — the objection 
 that the materialistic conception of history im- 
 plies a fatalistic determinism and offers no in- 
 ducement to the efforts of the individual — to 
 all this the Socialist makes broad denial. And 
 he can do it with what is, to his mind, the 
 best of authority: Karl Marx himself has 
 denied, that man is the mere puppet of economic 
 forces, and while he insists " that men are the 
 products of conditions and education, different 
 men, therefore, the products of other condi- 
 tions and changed education," he does not fail 
 to add " that circumstances may be altered by 
 
THE ASCENT OF MAN 71 
 
 men and that the educator has himself to be 
 educated." * The whole matter, therefore, 
 comes back to the name itself. " The Ma- 
 terialistic Conception of History " does not 
 properly express the thing it names, and a far 
 better title would be that suggested by Thor- 
 old Rogers and adopted by E. R. S. Seligman,t 
 " The Economic Interpretation of History." 
 
 To cease hair-splitting, and to return to our 
 muttons, the Socialist's reading of social evolu- 
 tion shows him that this evolution is, for the 
 most part, the result of twin forces : the pro- 
 duction, as we have already said, of food, 
 clothes and shelter, and the means of exchang- 
 ing such production. By an appeal to these 
 forces, he endeavors to explain the history 
 of man, and he sees that the same forces have 
 not only made war and peace, sailed into un- 
 known seas, discovered new continents and 
 overthrown old kingdoms, but have also 
 deeply affected the religion, the morals and the 
 arts of man. 
 
 In support of all this, he can — and if. you 
 give him a chance, he surely will — cite many 
 authorities, not a few of whom thought and 
 
 '^ " Feuerbach, The Roots of the Socialist Philosophy,'' 
 Friedrich Engels, Appendix, Austin Lewis's translation. 
 
 f " The Economic Interpretation of History,'' by E. 
 R. S. Seligman. 
 
72 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 wrote long before Karl Marx ever dreamed 
 his wonderful dream. It is certainly plain 
 that Aristotle, looking far forward, saw some- 
 thing of this sort ahead of him when he de- 
 clared that the slavery of his day, which meant 
 hand labor, could be overthrown only by the 
 invention of machines ; and it is not improbable 
 that even Gibbon had a glimmering of the So- 
 cialistic point of view when he maintained that 
 the word of the monarch could give authority, 
 but that the will of the people could alone 
 bestow power. Finally, the Socialist seldom 
 fails to quote from one of his own text-books 
 in showing that the French Revolution was 
 simply the triumph of those who possessed 
 nothing over those who possessed everything.* 
 Nevertheless, your true Socialist will be care- 
 ful to insist, with Marx, that the higher in- 
 dividual impulses have been factors with which 
 all historians must reckon. " The speculative, 
 ethical and artistic faculties in Man exist," says 
 Bax,t "as such ab initio in human Society, 
 althsugh undeveloped, and are not merely 
 products of the material facts of man's exist- 
 ence, albeit their manifestations at any given 
 
 * Engels, " Socialism Utopian and Scientific." 
 t " Essays in Socialism New and Old, The Material- 
 istic Doctrine of History.'' 
 
THE ASCENT OF MAN 73 
 
 time throughout the past have been always 
 sHghtly and often considerably modified by 
 those facts. . . . Indeed in some cases the hy- 
 pothesis of economic cause is superfluous, as 
 for example when a speculative belief arrived 
 at directly or indirectly by simple inference 
 from observation, by reflection, or by analogy, 
 has come to be held as an article of faith — 
 not merely as a pious opinion, but as something 
 which is to him who holds it as real as the 
 facts of his everyday life. Its influence on 
 action and on the course of human affairs in 
 such a case is absolutely certain and may be 
 quite as powerful as that of any form of eco- 
 nomic circumstance. Thus, the early Chris- 
 tian communities among whom the belief in 
 the approaching miraculous ' end of the age ' 
 or (later) in personal immortality was abso- 
 lutely undoubting, unquestionably had their 
 whole mind and action determined by these 
 beliefs. The latter developed of course upon 
 lines which to the then existing social and 
 political condition of the Roman world were 
 those of least resistance — ^but these external 
 conditions did not create them." 
 
 A great deal of this and more goes without 
 saying. Bad economic conditions produce a 
 literature of pessimism among the masses and 
 
74 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 a literature of superficial trivialities among the 
 ruling class : that was best shown in the France 
 of Louis XV. In like manner are painting 
 and music affected, and it is equally sure that 
 when conditions, viewed in the light of what 
 has been rather than that of what may be, 
 become good, the arts, as under the rule of 
 Elizabeth, revive and prosper. Finally, it may 
 be admitted that, as in the days of the Crusad- 
 ers in Palestine, the Moors in Spain, the Crom- 
 wellians in England and the Japanese in Man- 
 churia, religion becomes a force more and more 
 vital as material conditions require its inspira- 
 tion or consolation. It is from such facts 
 that the Socialist concludes that, once man has 
 been freed from all economic oppression, the 
 arts will reach their full realization and re- 
 ligion obtain its highest ideal. 
 
 In explaining the more material facts of his- 
 tory, Green and McMaster have made the So- 
 cialist's task much easier. He now points out 
 that it was not until Rome could no longer 
 support the Romans that Caesar conquered 
 Gaul. He maintains that, instead of Luther 
 making the Reformation, the Reformation — 
 being itself the result of the break-up of Feu- 
 dalism, the development of the handicrafts, and 
 the discovery of the individual — made Luther. 
 
THE ASCENT OF MAN 75 
 
 He shows that it was a commercial necessity, 
 the need of a new route to India, which sent 
 forth Columbus to the discovery of America. 
 He demonstrates the fact that it was over-tax- 
 ation which awoke the American colonists to 
 a sense of liberty and produced the Declaration 
 of Independence; and he declares that — while 
 he honors the hatred of Garrison and the 
 courage of John Brown in the propaganda 
 against the black curse of chattel slavery — it 
 was the growing economic importance of slave 
 labor that resurrected the doctrine of state's 
 rights and ended in the War of the Rebellion. 
 
 We have now gone far enough to show that 
 modern Socialism is a theory of Social evolu- 
 tion and. not a Utopian vision. The present- 
 day Socialist has no hope of bringing about 
 the co-operative commonwealth by any sudden 
 revolution and, though he may here and there 
 attempt to demonstrate the practicability of his 
 theories by the establishment of an isolated 
 community conducted upon co-operative prin- 
 ciples, he awaits the realization of his scheme 
 in what is to him the certainty of that evolu- 
 tionary progress. 
 
 It would be interesting, and it would be not 
 uninstructive, to treat at length of his fore- 
 runners. I should like to tell again the story 
 
76 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 of the Republic of Plato; of Thomas More's 
 Utopia; of Campanella; of Cabet's "Icaria"; 
 of Saint Simon; Charles Fourier and Louis 
 Blanc. But to do so here and now would be 
 impertinent to the present question. One and 
 all, these men sought the great panacea that 
 was to work the miracle of instant regenera- 
 tion, and that miracle the Socialist now knows, 
 as truly as the Capitalist, to be impossible. 
 Socialism, like history, has tried to become 
 scientific ; it has passed beyond the Utopian and 
 its only interest to the readers of such a brief 
 treatise as this lies in its actions of the present 
 and its plans for the future and has place for 
 the past only in so far as these present actions 
 and future plans are shaped by its scientific 
 formulation of history. We must, therefore, 
 in the remainder of this chapter confine our- 
 selves to an inquiry into the Socialist's theories 
 concerning the birth of Industrialism and his 
 reasons for beheving that Industrialism is 
 eventually to give place to the Socialistic State. 
 Going back again to Darwin, the Socialist 
 points out that the author of " The Descent 
 of Man " and " The Origin of Species " was 
 himself convinced of the natural value of co- 
 operation. " Those communities," says Dar- 
 win, " which include the greatest number of 
 
THE ASCENT OF MAN T7 
 
 the most sympathetic members, would flourish 
 best and raise the greatest number of off- 
 spring." * And this has been made even 
 clearer by Kropotkin when he says : 
 
 " If we resort to an indirect test and ask 
 nature : ' Who are the fittest : those who are 
 continually at war with each other, or those 
 who support one another ? ' we at once see that 
 those animals which acquire habits of mutual 
 aid are undoubtedly the fittest. They have 
 more chances to survive, and they attain, in 
 their respective classes, the highest develop- 
 ment of intelligence and bodily organization. 
 If the numberless facts which can be brought 
 forward to support this view are taken into 
 account, we may safely say that mutual aid 
 is as much a law of animal life as mutual 
 struggle, but that, as a factor of evolution, 
 it most probably has a far greater importance, 
 inasmuch as it favors the development of such 
 habits and characters as insure the maintenance 
 and further development of its species, together 
 with the greatest amount of welfare and en- 
 joyment of life for the individual, with the 
 least waste of energy." f 
 
 * Darwin, " The Descent of Man." 
 t " Mutual Aid a Factor of Evolution," Prince Peter 
 Kropotkin. 
 
78 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 Accepting this, then, the Socialist applies 
 the same law to modern communities of men. 
 He cites the utter inefficiency of the interne- 
 cine-warring of the several Italian states at 
 the moment of the Austrian occupation, and 
 compares that inefficiency with the relative 
 strength of modern United Italy. In like man- 
 ner, he thumbs the pages of history and en- 
 deavors to demonstrate that, among men as 
 truly as among the lower animals, the struggle 
 for existence gives way to co-opei^ation for 
 existence, and produces a better general ability 
 to survive. 
 
 Of course, says the Socialist, that part of 
 the history of man of which we have any writ- 
 ten record is proportionately a very small one. 
 As a matter of fact, he declares that the race 
 has thus far been in a state of savagery for 
 ninety-five per cent, of its time, and during 
 the bulk of that longer period was living the 
 communistic life. In such conditions wealth- 
 making was a tribal affair, and however the 
 tribe warred against its neighbors, it co- 
 operated within itself. It was in such cir- 
 cumstances, the Socialist maintains, that the 
 animals were first domesticated, the cereals 
 first cultivated, the metals first smelted and the 
 wheel, the lever, the rudder and the loom in- 
 
THE ASCENT OF MAN 79 
 
 vented. And no sooner, he pursues, did com- 
 petition appear and assume control than the 
 old forces were revived and co-operation, in 
 the form of combination, re-asserted itself as 
 a natural tendency against which legislation 
 has been powerless and public opinion impo- 
 tent. Thus, he argues that the trusts, by prov- 
 ing that combination produces greater profits 
 with less waste and a larger share of considera- 
 tion for the workman, are establishing his own 
 theory of a co-operative commonwealth. Let 
 us try to understand, in as brief a space as 
 may be, how he endeavors to substantiate 
 such a conclusion. 
 
 According to this view of the industrial his- 
 tory of the race, the chronicle of humanity 
 divides itself into six well-defined portions : 
 
 ( 1 ) Communism. 
 
 (2) Slavery. 
 
 (3) Oligarchy. 
 
 (4) Feudalism. 
 
 (5) The three stages of Capitalism. 
 
 (6) Socialism. 
 
 Communism 
 
 From the point of view of the Socialist — 
 and it must be remembered that this is the 
 point of view which we are assuming through- 
 
8o WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 out the remainder of the present chapter — 
 mankind, as we have just seen, has passed fully 
 ninety-five per cent, of his time, or the whole 
 period of his primitive existence, in a condition 
 of communism. This was the natural or sav- 
 age communism, in no way to be confused with 
 the modern pseudo-philosophical attempts in 
 the same general direction. Under its sway 
 the clan was the unit of power, class and caste 
 were unknown for the excellent reason that 
 the only wealth was tribal wealth, and there 
 was no such thing as private property except 
 as private property may be said to exist in 
 the personal ownership of the simple tools nec- 
 essary to each individual for the acquittal of 
 his share of the whole tribe's work, and the 
 equally simple weapons necessary to each war- 
 rior for the acquittal of his share in the whole 
 tribe's wars. 
 
 Wars there were, however, in plenty; when 
 one tribe had exhausted the game native to 
 its own forests, it moved naturally forward to 
 the nearest forest that was unexhausted. If 
 that forest happened to be unoccupied by any 
 other tribe of men, there was no harm done; 
 but as men multiplied, hunting-grounds grew 
 less, and every advance of the tribe came to 
 mean an act of trespass upon the preserves of 
 
THE ASCENT OF MAN 8i 
 
 its neighbor, when, the neighbor naturally- 
 resenting this intrusion, the intruder was either 
 driven otherwhere or else his involuntary host 
 was himself ousted and forced, in his turn, to 
 descend upon the forests of yet another clan. 
 It will be readily realized that this was no 
 time for prisoners. In that simple state of 
 Society, each tribe was producing only those 
 things that were necessary for its own mainte- 
 nance. If an enemy were made captive, one 
 of his captors would have to do double work 
 to support him ; the work for his support would 
 have to be divided among several captors, or 
 the captive would have to be adopted into the 
 tribe and allowed to do the proper share of 
 work for his own support. The natural con- 
 sequence of all this was that prisoners were 
 dispensed with in the simplest manner in the 
 world : they were killed. If the victors hap- 
 pened to be cannibals, then the prisoners were 
 not only killed but cooked; yet, in any event, 
 prisoners-of-war were about as frequent under 
 communism as are snakes in Ireland. 
 
 Slavery 
 
 You will remember that we have said that 
 the animals were domesticated, the cereals cul- 
 
82 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 tivated, the metals smelted and the wheel, the 
 lever, the rudder and the loom invented under 
 primitive communism. It is clear that, as soon 
 as these steps forw^ard had been taken, those 
 individuals best adapted by their wit to take 
 advantage of such progress, were each soon in 
 a position to produce more than was necessary 
 for his own existence. Domestic exchange 
 became more common and inter-tribal trade 
 was established. There was, in time, thus 
 created a use for prisoners-of-war : they were 
 put to work. 
 
 Here, then, was the beginning of "chattel- 
 slavery. The slave had become an economic 
 necessity, was endowed with an economic 
 value. At first he was, of course, like all other 
 wealth, the property of the clan, but, as trade 
 and inventions continued to grow and extend, 
 and as individuals continued to increase the 
 bulk of personal property — as, in a word, com- 
 munism began to disintegrate — the slave and 
 \his heirs became the property of the captor and 
 his descendants. By the unpaid labor of his 
 hands the slave erected for his masters the first 
 leisured class that the world had ever seen, and 
 on the corner-stone of his heart was built the 
 highest culture and civilization of the Golden 
 Age. 
 
THE ASCENT OF MAN 83 
 
 Oligarchy 
 
 The next link in the chain follows by the 
 same logic that binds the links which precede 
 and those which follow it. Once the slave 
 had become the private property of his captor, 
 that captor was enabled to produce more 
 articles of exchange value than could be pro- 
 duced by the man that had no slave. In like 
 manner, the man with many slaves was pos- 
 sessed of a greater earning machine than the 
 man with one. Thus the commodities pro- 
 duced by the many slaves of the one man were 
 soon exchangeable for still other slaves, and 
 in this way slave-ownership speedily became 
 the perquisite of a single class. It is to this 
 process that we owe the establishment of the 
 Oligarchy, which, whether Grecian or Roman, 
 ruled the world before the dawn of Feudalism. 
 
 Feudalism 
 
 The Oligarchy was also but a transitory 
 state; it held within itself at birth the seeds 
 of its decay. Even the huge estates of the 
 masters became over-burdened with slaves, and 
 the slaves themselves thus grew to be the great- 
 est menace to the condition that they had 
 created. 
 
84 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 It yas a situation not previously unknown 
 in Nature. When the ants from one hill make 
 a foray upon their neighbors, they invariably 
 bring back with them captives whom they set 
 at once to menial tasks. There, now and al- 
 ways, as at one time among men, the slave 
 must serve his master, but there also the slaves 
 breed among themselves and, once grown to 
 stronger numbers than their captors, they pro- 
 ceed either to an exhibition of force that will 
 ameliorate their condition, or to an open out- 
 break that will subvert the society of their 
 particular ant-hill. 
 
 Face to face with such outbreaks, and know- 
 ing that the revolutionary forces were likely 
 at any moment to be aided by invading hordes 
 of barbarians from the North — ^tribes still in 
 a state of semi-communism and seeking, in 
 effect, new hunting-grounds — ^the great slave 
 states came naturally to their end. When an 
 estate produced more slaves than it could main- 
 tain, it added an enemy to the Oligarchy in 
 every slave to whom it granted freedom, for 
 the freed slave could not compete against slave- 
 labor. Forced, as all such progress is, along 
 the line of least resistance, the master was 
 compelled to say to his bondsman : 
 
 " I can no longer support you. You must 
 
THE ASCENT OF MAN 85 
 
 support yourself. I will therefore make you 
 and your family my hereditary tenants. You 
 may cultivate my land for your own purposes, 
 giving me only a certain percentage of all that 
 you raise thereon. In this way my own power 
 and material well-being will continue assured, 
 and the responsibility of your maintenance will 
 rest not upon me, but upon you." 
 
 That was the birth of Feudalism. The slave 
 became a serf, and whereas he was once an 
 asset of the individual, he now became an asset 
 of the estate. In other words, he went with 
 the land, and when one baron bought the 
 estates of another — or when, as was far oftener 
 the case, he secured them by force of arms 
 or act of royal deprivation — ^he received the 
 serfs along with the estate. 
 
 Feudalism developed, of course, to enormous 
 height, but it was all built upon the back of 
 the serf. What the serf was to his master, 
 the master was, in lesser degree, to his own 
 over-lord, and upon the shoulders of them all 
 sat the king, the divinely-appointed lieutenant 
 of God, for the conduct of that portion of His 
 kingdom. And yet, in spite of all this — in spite 
 of his degraded position, in spite of cruel treat- 
 ment to himself and unspeakable inhumanity 
 to his women — the serf was in a condition not 
 
86 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 quite so bad as that of the slave. He had his 
 own family, his own house, his own share of 
 land, his own right to work, and if he must 
 bear arms in time of war for his master, his 
 master at all times owed him a certain physical 
 protection. 
 
 Capitalism 
 
 (a) All this while, however, there was 
 slowly growing up in the world another class 
 of workers. On the big Feudal estates, the 
 major portion of the necessary labor was done 
 by the serfs, but as civilization grew more com- 
 plex along the lines that we have indicated, and 
 as the needs and desires of man increased, there 
 arose the necessity of toil more delicate and 
 specialized than could be accomplished by the 
 villein, who sowed and reaped, or his wife and 
 daughter, who spun and carded. This toil 
 was the handicrafts, and it found its recruits 
 among the freedmen, the descendants of those 
 slaves who were given liberty under the pre- 
 vious dispensation, or the soldiers, who were 
 forced into peaceful pursuits during the in- 
 creasingly long intervals between war and war. 
 
 The handicraftsmen divided themselves 
 rigidly. Each man stuck to his trade, but 
 
THE ASCENT OF MAN 87 
 
 each man turned out a finished product, a com- 
 plete article of exchange. There was at first 
 no division of labor, and each finished article 
 represented the labor of one man. This, how- 
 ever, did not last long. The manufactured 
 articles grew in complexity and delicacy with 
 the growing demands of civilization, and it was 
 soon necessary for different men to specialize 
 upon different portions of the same article. 
 Manufactiire was socialized. 
 
 Meanwhile, though the serf, as we have seen, 
 had the protection of his baron, the handi- 
 craftsman, being a freedman, was undefended. 
 He, therefore, undertook to defend himself by 
 organization. The workers organized guilds. 
 Each trade had its own guild and each guild 
 exacted, on the one hand, a certain grade of 
 excellence in the work of its members, and, 
 on the other, defended those members against 
 the encroachments of other guilds and the ever- 
 growing jealousies of the titled classes. This 
 was the nucleus of the modern trade-union. 
 
 The next step was one that perhaps I have 
 sufficiently indicated in the preceding chapter. 
 It was soon observed that better results could 
 be obtained by combination, and so a more 
 fortunate workman would build a workshop, 
 provide tools and hire handicraftsmen for 
 
88 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 wages to do their work for him. Thus enter 
 the CapitaHst, who at once proceeded to ex- 
 change social products for private profit, put- 
 ting into his own purse the entire sum received 
 for a workman's toil, less only the cost of raw 
 material, the share of the investments on the 
 machines and the wages of the workmen. Be^ 
 ing enabled by combination to turn out a better 
 product at less cost, he had soon begun to 
 crowd the individual handicraftsman to the 
 wall and then to lift him over the wall into 
 his own factory. The result was the forma- 
 tion of a new class, the wage-earning class, 
 so that, as the system grew, the men ceased 
 to be the slaves of the soil and became the 
 slaves of the tools, while the real masters 
 ceased to be the owners of land and became 
 the owners of workingmen and working-tools. 
 In other words, there was here started the 
 system that the Socialist calls Wage-Slavery. 
 
 (b) In very much this way events moved 
 slowly along until the latter portion of the 
 seventeenth century, but then the growth of 
 trade and the development of colonial depend- 
 encies resulted in a series of inventions, which 
 appeared with such appalling speed that labor 
 conditions, unable so suddenly to adapt them- 
 selves to the new order, suffered more severely 
 
THE ASCENT OF MAN 89 
 
 than they had done since the rise of the Cap- 
 itaHstic system. The result was that great 
 industrial revolution which I mentioned in the 
 first chapter, the revolution wrought by machin- 
 ery. In 1765, a machine for weaving ribbons 
 came into general use in Saxony and soon 
 made its way into England. Five years later 
 Hargreaves patented his " spinning jenny " ; 
 in 1771, the water-power spinning machine of 
 Arkwright made its appearance, shortly to be 
 followed by the inventions of Crompton and 
 Cartwright. Immediately there began an in- 
 dustrial reign of terror. With the machines, 
 a child could do more work and better work 
 than several men could do by hand. At once 
 thousands of laborers found themselves with- 
 out means of support; small manufacturers, 
 unable to purchase the new means of produc- 
 tion, were forced by the legion back into the 
 already so hideously overcrowded ranks of the 
 workers ; the old personal relationship between 
 employer and employe almost entirely van- 
 ished, and, until the former workmen were 
 compelled to send their sons and daughters to 
 the factories for the support of the family, 
 armies of children, not infrequently defective 
 of mind and certain soon to become defective 
 of body, were brought from the public work- 
 
90 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 houses and set, amid the most abominable con- 
 ditions, to the newly-created tasks. 
 
 Nor was that all. The struggle for work 
 within the working class was soon paralleled 
 by an equally bitter struggle for pre-eminence 
 among the employers. In England, where all 
 this revolution centered, the growing demands 
 of India and the American colonies plied trade 
 with a desperate wine, which soon produced 
 delirium. Competition became the single rule 
 of production, and Capitalism entered upon its 
 second period, the period in which Competition 
 was universally believed to be the life of trade. 
 
 (c) The third, and what the Socialist con- 
 siders as the last stage of Capitalism, is one 
 well within the personal observation of every 
 reader of this book. Here again the strong 
 conquered the weak; the great crowded the 
 small ; the big swallowed the little. The manu- 
 facturers rediscovered the truth that better 
 work could be more cheaply done by joining 
 forces, and where there were a hundred fac- 
 tories engaged in the production of the same 
 article, twenty-five, by combining under a 
 single head, could and did very shortly force 
 the remaining seventy-five out of the running. 
 In that twenty-five, there logically followed a 
 similar process of elimination, and the next 
 
THE ASCENT OF MAN 91 
 
 step was the realization of the newly-born 
 theory that a combination of various industries 
 must be as successful in the general field of 
 trade as combinations of various branches of 
 the same industry had just been within their 
 own special limits. Competition was the par- 
 ent of Combination, and Combination was now 
 able to bring several industries under a single 
 head. 
 
 Socialism 
 
 Having arrived, by this process of reasoning, 
 at his conception of modern conditions, it is 
 easy to see how the Socialist proceeds to his 
 conception of those conditions which are to 
 follow. He casts upon the future the light that 
 he has kindled from the past, and he sees ahead 
 of him what amounts to a great combination 
 that, with all the merits of its predecessors, 
 shall control the sources of production and dis- 
 tribution, if not in every industiy, at least in 
 those industries which are necessary to life and 
 communication among men. 
 
 How the Socialist expects such a combina- 
 tion to work, how he will apply it to the forces 
 of government and to the existence of the in- 
 dividual, we shall inquire in another place. At 
 this point, it is sufficient briefly to recapitulate 
 
92 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 the argument whereby he arrives at these con- 
 clusions. 
 
 The SociaHst beheves, then, that his theories 
 are to be demonstrated by the slow working- 
 out of an inexorable law of Social-evolution. 
 This law he traces in what he calls " The Ma- 
 terialistic Conception of History." And that 
 conception does not have to do either with 
 atheism or fatalism, but merely considers: 
 
 (i) That history is the story of the great- 
 ness of the people as a mass, of their changing 
 economic conditions. 
 
 (2) And that — -allowing for the religious 
 and artistic impulses that, however, are them- 
 selves at least affected by economic conditions 
 — all history is the result of a social-evolution- 
 ary development of the means of producing 
 and exchanging the necessities of life. 
 
 Communism^ he declares — and this is gen- 
 erally accepted — was the social state of primi- 
 tive man, and under it private property was 
 unknown. 
 
 Communism was destroyed by Slavery be- 
 cause slave-labor — the labor of slaves captured 
 in war by communistic communities — created 
 individual wealth and an Oligarchy. 
 
 Oligarchy destroyed Slavery, because OH- 
 
THE ASCENT OF MAN 93 
 
 garchy itself soon became overburdened with 
 slaves and was forced to give them a degree 
 of personal freedom and, detaching them from 
 the person of their master, was compelled to 
 attach them to the land, the social order passing 
 into Feudalism. 
 
 Feudalism was destroyed by the rise of the 
 handicrafts, because, with the growth of trade, 
 wealth passed from the ownership of land to 
 the ownership of tools, labor becoming the 
 slave of the tool in this the first stage of 
 Capitalism. 
 
 The Handicrafts were destroyed by the in- 
 vention of machines, because the machines 
 could produce better articles of manufacture 
 with less waste of time, labor becoming the 
 slave of the machine in this the second, or com- 
 petitive, stage of Capitalism. 
 
 Finally, the machines were combined, the 
 factories merged into one another, because bet- 
 ter work with less waste could be more cheaply 
 accomplished by such combination — a whole 
 branch of manufacture being first combined 
 under one head and then several branches so 
 combined, in this the third, or co-operative, 
 stage of Capitalism — until, in the Socialist's 
 view, the same reasons of efficiency must com- 
 pel a general combination that, with all the 
 
94 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 merits of its predecessors, shall control the 
 sources of production and distribution, if not 
 in every industry, at least in those industries 
 which are necessary to life and communication 
 among men. 
 
IV 
 
 WHITHER ? 
 
 " In the multitude of people is the king's honour : but 
 in the want of people is the destruction of the prince." 
 — Tlie Book of Proverbs 14 : 28. 
 
 It may have appeared to the reader that, in 
 the latter part of the preceding chapter, I de- 
 voted too much space to the theories of the 
 SociaHst regarding the trend of CapitaHsm, 
 and too Httle to the arguments that the oppo- 
 nents of Socialism advance against those 
 theories. In that instance it was, however, 
 necessary clearly to bring before the reader 
 the Socialistic attitude as a whole, and not 
 piecemeal. The subject here is one that must, 
 for the sake of lucidity, be considered in con- 
 crete units, because not until we have com- 
 passed the entire viewpoint of the Marxian, 
 in this particular, can we adequately appreciate 
 the objections of his critics or the rebuttal of 
 their antagonists. Nevertheless, such an ob- 
 servation having now been achieved, we may 
 95 
 
96 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 safely proceed to the Capitalistic commentary 
 thereon. 
 
 We have seen, then, that, according to the 
 Socialist, the rise of Capitalism, overthrowing 
 Feudalism, created a class of wage-earners, a 
 permanent class, that replaced the serfs, who 
 were bound to the land, by a class of workers 
 who were bound to their tools. We have seen 
 how, with the advent of machines, the bonds- 
 men of the tools became, in the Socialistic 
 theory, the bondsmen of those who owned the 
 machinery, and how, with the opening of for- 
 eign markets with the increase of speed in the 
 intercourse between nations, the owners of 
 machines both stimulated and participated in 
 the great system of Competition. And we 
 have, finally, seen how Competition is — still 
 according to the Socialist — ^giving inevitable 
 way to concentration and monopoly. 
 
 In other words, the Socialist now declares 
 that, though Capital has grown, though the 
 value of manufactured products has increased, 
 and though there is thus an ever-enlarging de- 
 mand for labor, separate industrial establish- 
 ments have not multiplied in that proportion 
 to such advances as characterized the relations 
 existing between these elements in the days of 
 Competition. It is pointed out by the oppo- 
 
WHITHER? 97 
 
 nents of Capitalism that, whereas a relatively 
 short time ago, the bulk of American wealth, 
 for instance, was divided between one group 
 of men that controlled the coal-supply, another 
 that owned the oil-fields, a third that manip- 
 ulated the steel and iron market — and so on 
 down the line of productions— to-day these 
 various groups, besides joining forces with 
 similar groups in Eui^ope, Australia, South 
 America and the Orient, have merged and 
 coalesced, eliminating the weaker members of 
 their class, until now the man that is a power 
 in one particular is a power in all — until, in 
 a word, the production of the universal neces- 
 sities of life and progressive civilization are in 
 the hands of a comparatively few individuals — 
 and it is from this that the Socialist argues 
 that the merging and coalition, the combina- 
 tion and elimination are to proceed, by law of 
 social, or, at least, industrial, evolution to the 
 point where an almost complete monopoly of 
 these forces is to be formed and, at last, ac- 
 quired by a centralized representative govern- 
 ment. 
 
 To the premises of this argument the Capi- 
 talistic economists of the highest rank give but 
 a partial assent. They announce, in effect, that 
 concentration is not so sweeping as it appears. 
 
98 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 and they point out that, if concentration is not 
 sweeping, then there is little danger of national 
 interindustrialism and none at all of interna- 
 tional interindustrialism. 
 
 In their own behalf^ these economists put 
 forward not a few facts. If concentration 
 is so far advanced, why is it, they ask : 
 
 (i) That, in industry, so many minor con- 
 cerns continue? 
 
 (2) That, in farming, agricultural opera- 
 tion by combination is a failure and farm acre- 
 age decreasing? 
 
 (3) And that, in the relations of producer 
 and distributor to the consumer, though the 
 department-shop has arrived, the smaller shops 
 remain ? 
 
 Let us now consider the Socialist's answers. 
 
 (i) Minor industries, he admits, do, as a 
 class, increase and maintain their numerical 
 strength, but individually they neither continue 
 nor retain the virility of their predecessors.. 
 On the one hand, their growth is incomparable 
 to that of the vaster combinations, which en- 
 compass more labor and greater capital, and, 
 on the other, while the ranks are constantly 
 filled by new recruits, each separate minor in- 
 dustry, as soon as it grows to proportions that 
 will make it valuable as an ally, or terrible as 
 
WHITHER? 99 
 
 a competitor, to the vaster combination in its 
 own field, is, by that combination, straightway 
 either bought over or stamped out. In brief, 
 says the Sociahst, for every one of these lesser 
 concerns that continues an existence sufficiently 
 innocuous to keep its owners alive without a 
 growth that will render it either desirable or 
 dangerous to the Trusts, there are, say, a hun- 
 dred that are absorbed by those Trusts and 
 nine hundred that, rooted out by the Trusts, 
 leave their owners with no choice but them- 
 selves to become employes and so to swell the 
 army of the Proletariat, or wage-earners. 
 
 (2) The capitalistic economists formulate, 
 as even the Socialist must .admit, a strong argu- 
 ment when they choose agriculture for their 
 weapon. Most of us can remember the ap- 
 pearance and spread of the bonanza farm; the 
 demonstration thereby, as in other industries, 
 that massed capital and consolidated interest 
 made for cheaper production, and the general 
 prophecy that here again the big fish were to 
 eat the little. But most of us also are now 
 aware that, in spite of all this, small farms have 
 almost everywhere grown in number, and that 
 the average acreage of farms has, almost every- 
 where, dwindled. The bonanza farm is un- 
 able to compete with its minor kindred. 
 
loo WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 Look more carefully, answers the Socialist, 
 at your census figures. These will show you 
 that, if large farms have grown fewer, the in- 
 dependent farm-owners have lessened at a still 
 greater rate, whereas the army of tenant-farm- 
 ers have, by the same token, and in the same 
 proportion, increased. Not only is concentra- 
 tion — by such means as the absorption of the 
 butter and cheese industries — working against 
 the small farmer, but in nine out of ten in- 
 stances the tenant-farmer is indirectly the ten- 
 ant of land in corporate control, and in ninety 
 out of a hundred cases that still larger * legion 
 of his agricultural brethren that are staggering 
 under the yoke of the mortgage have borrowed 
 their money from banking, insuring and trust 
 institutions, which are the instruments of the 
 capitalistic group. Thus concentration of con- 
 trol continues to grow while permitting a meas- 
 ure of individuality among the agrarian units. 
 
 (3) In very much the same manner does the 
 Socialist answer the question of the capitalistic 
 economist about the survival of the small shop 
 in the retail mart. He points to the fact t 
 
 * " In 1890, the mortgaged indebtedness of the farmers 
 of the United States amounted to the immense sum of 
 $1 ,085,995,960."— Spargo. 
 
 t " Our Benevolent Feudalism," W. J. Ghent. 
 
WHITHER? loi 
 
 that in America, as elsewhere, the vast brew- 
 ing combinations control thousands of saloons; 
 that similar combinations conduct chains of 
 grocery-stores and cafes, bakeries, shoe-shops 
 and what not, and that, in a word, this con- 
 centration of control is so sweeping, though 
 often so indirect, that the individual retailer is 
 certainly far more rare than he appears to be. 
 Finally, he points out that neither Marx, nor 
 the true interpreter of Marx, has ever con- 
 tended that the lesser industries would cease 
 to exist even in the ideal Socialistic State, and 
 that then, as now, there would still be a place, 
 even a need, for them. 
 
 The critic of Socialism argues, and argues 
 well, that concentration of wealth does not in- 
 evitably follow concentration of industry, but 
 the Socialist replies that follow it does, whether 
 inevitably or not. 
 
 " It is possible," says the critic, " for a trust, 
 a concentrated industry, to be divided into in- 
 numerable shares, held by innumerable persons, 
 so that, although the industry is concentrated, 
 the wealth is distributed." 
 
 " Possible," replies the Socialist, " but not 
 actual. An examination of the books of our 
 trusts. will show that the great bulk of the 
 
102 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 stock is held by a small group of men, and 
 that nearly all of it is in the hands of the em- 
 ploying class as opposed to the laboring class." 
 
 And the Socialist insists that the tendency 
 is constantly toward greater sequestration of 
 wealth. Sixty years ago, statisticians declared 
 that there were only ten millionaires in Amer- 
 ica; to-day there are five thousand — ^two thou- 
 sand in New York City alone. Sixty years 
 ago the richest private estate was that of 
 Stephen Girard, estimated at seven million dol- 
 lars; to-day a conservative estimate of John 
 D. Rockefeller's fortune places that estate at 
 nearly one hundred times as much. 
 
 This, argues the Socialist, does not mean 
 that there are proportionately more people ac- 
 cumulating wealth. The growth in the num- 
 ber of millionaires, far from keeping pace with 
 the growth in the population of the country, 
 has fallen desperately behind and, as the great- 
 est fortunes grow still greater, the number of 
 large fortunes wanes proportionately smaller 
 and smaller. Thus, as in England one-tenth 
 of the people own one-half of the wealth, so 
 in the United States seven-eighths of the wealth 
 is owned by one-eighth of the people. 
 
 In brief, then, the Socialist contends : 
 
WHITHER? 103 
 
 ( 1 ) That competition, being a trade-war of 
 the strong against the weak, must end by the 
 triumph of the strong over the weak, the strong 
 acquiring the industries of the weak, as the 
 spoils of battle, and setting up combination and 
 concentration. 
 
 (2) That, as this process continues, it forms 
 a constantly smaller and wealthier group of 
 Capitalists controlling and a constantly larger 
 and poorer class of workers controlled. 
 
 (3) That, on the one hand, the economic 
 efficiency of combinations thus demonstrated, 
 and, on the other, the overwhelming hordes of 
 voting workmen thus recruited, the process will 
 result in the majority of the voters — the work- 
 ing-class, or proletariat — using their ballots to 
 turn over to public control, for the public bene- 
 fit, those economically efficient great combina- 
 tions of such industries as are necessary for 
 the well-being of society at large. 
 
 This, says the Socialist, will be the coming 
 of the Co-operative Commonwealth and the 
 end of the War of the Classes. 
 
V 
 
 THE WAR OF THE CLASSES 
 
 " It is of benefit to them and to the public that 
 laborers should unite in their common interest and for 
 lawful purposes. They have labor to sell. If they 
 stand together, they are often able, all of them, to 
 command better prices for their labor than when dealing 
 singly with rich employers, because the necessities of 
 the single employe may compel him to accept any terms 
 offered him. 
 
 " The accumulation of a fund for the support of 
 those who feel that the wages offered are below market 
 prices is one of the legitimate objects of such an 
 organization. They have the right to appoint officers 
 who shall advise them as to the course to be taken by 
 them in their relations to their employer. They may 
 unite with other unions. The officers they appoint, or 
 any other person to whom they choose to listen, may 
 advise them as to the proper course to be taken by 
 them in regard to their employment, or, if they choose 
 to repose such authority in any one, may order them, 
 on pain of expulsion from the union, peaceably to leave 
 the employ of their employer because any of the terms 
 of their employment are unsatisfactory." 
 
 — William Howard Taft, Opinion in the Phelan Case. 
 
 The Socialist, as I have said, believes that 
 Capitalism has created two classes: the em- 
 104 
 
THE WAR O.-^ THE CLASSES 105 
 
 ployer and the employed. His theory is that 
 all society, under Capitalism, is thus divided: 
 that there is no third, or middle, class; that the 
 employing class exists by exploiting the em- 
 ployed, and that the division, always sharp, 
 is steadily becoming sharper — at which stage 
 of his exposition he adds that the ultimate 
 separation has inevitably brought forth an ir- 
 reconcilable opposition of interests between the 
 pair of classes — the Capitalists and the Pro- 
 letariat — an opposition that he variously calls, 
 as we have previously noted, the Class Strug- 
 gle and the War of the Classes. 
 
 I shall, as usual, by your leave, state, first, 
 the criticisms of this theory as advanced by 
 the Capitalistic economists ; then proceed to the 
 Socialist's general explanation of his idea, and 
 finally take up his answers to the objections 
 of his opponents. 
 
 Any statement of American class-antago- 
 nism, say these critics, is false and artificial up- 
 on its facej because there are no classes in the 
 United States, because men have always been 
 able to rise from among the employes to a place 
 among the employers, and because any theory 
 of divisional struggle is contrary to the very 
 principles of equality before the law upon 
 which our government is founded. It is dan- 
 
io6 WHAT IS SCCIALISM? 
 
 gerous because it creates bitterness by appeal- 
 ing to the passions of the mob; it is low because 
 it presupposes that society is shaped solely by 
 selfish motives, and it is evil because the theory 
 of a Class Struggle means a theory of economy, 
 politics and morality based upon the animosity 
 of man toward man. 
 
 If such a condition did exist, say these com- 
 mentators, it would be an inherent condition, 
 not to be ended by the organization of indi- 
 viduals with no common interest to unite them 
 save an interest of opposition towards a com- 
 mon enemy. Whatever differences there are 
 between Capital and Labor are not fundamen- 
 tal, and they may be terminated by an exercise 
 of benevolence on the part of Capital, since 
 Capital is in the position to exercise authority, 
 since the interests of Capital and Labor are 
 identical, and since the divergence of the two 
 is due only to a common misunderstanding of 
 the existence of that commonality of interest. 
 
 In any case, the law, which boasts that it 
 provides a remedy for every wrong, guarantees 
 justice to both sides. Our courts are as open 
 to the poor as to the rich, and their reason 
 for being is for the distribution of justice alike 
 to the employe and the employer. Yet, disre- 
 garding this, Labor organizes into trades- 
 
THE WAR OF THE CLASSES 107 
 
 unionism, the workingmen sink their far more 
 important differences — the differences among 
 themselves of race, religion and politics — in 
 combinations that, as soon as they have ob- 
 tained power, become tyrannical, seeking to 
 destroy on the one hand the personal liberty of 
 the employer to run his own business as he 
 chooses and, on the other, to limit the individ- 
 ual liberty of the workingman to sell his labor 
 wheresoever, and at whatsoever price, he him- 
 self sees fit. And all this regardless of the 
 fact that Capital continues to win its battles 
 in the majority of strikes, thus providing proof 
 positive that the ultimate triumph of Labor is — 
 supposing that a Class Struggle could exist — 
 impossible. Capital, law-abiding, American, 
 conquering though unorganized, asks, there- 
 fore, what possible reason there can be for 
 organization of any sort — ^by conscious union- 
 ism or unconscious enlistment — on the part of 
 Labor. 
 
 The Socialist's reply to this begins by his 
 statement of the whole theory of Class 
 Struggle. 
 
 The theory so generally misunderstood is, 
 he says, a rule of social evolution. 
 
 Karl Marx published " Das Capital " in the 
 
io8 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 nineteenth century, but class divisions, says the 
 Socialist, have existed from the very break-up 
 of that communism under which, as we have 
 recently observed, primitive man lived out his 
 simple life. Slavery, as we know, was the ser- 
 pent that entered that communistic garden, 
 created class oppositions therein and thus 
 brought to an end that period of social history. 
 The true welfare of the slaves was opposed to 
 the material welfare of their masters; there 
 was an inevitable and irreconcilable economic 
 antagonism, and the result of that antagonism 
 was the end of the primitive social order. 
 
 Under feudalism the differences between the 
 nobility and the serfs repeated the differences 
 that had existed between the masters and the 
 slaves, but, meanwhile, there arose another 
 class, which was destined, by a like inevitable 
 and irreconcilable antagonism, to end the sys- 
 tem that gave it birth. The nobility or land- 
 owners were the ruling class, but the free 
 handicraftsmen soon created a wealthy com- 
 mercial class, which, organizing into strong 
 guilds or unions, developed needs inevitably 
 and irreconcilably opposed to the needs of the 
 nobility, and presented against the nobility a 
 solid front, a mighty instrument of warfare, 
 which the monarchs, themselves inevitably and 
 
THE WAR OF THE CLASSES 109 
 
 irreconcilably jealous of the feudal nobility, at 
 once employed for the nobility's destruction. 
 
 The class thus triumphant became, of course, 
 the Capitalistic class of modern times. In the 
 era of Competition it was too disturbed by in- 
 ternecine conflicts to oppress its employes and 
 thus force those employes to that organization 
 which is at once the social expression of class 
 self-realization and the change from passive-an- 
 tagonism to active class-warfare. But as com- 
 petition gave way to combination, and com- 
 bination to trustification and intertrustification, 
 the semi-conscious organization of the ruling, 
 or Capitalistic class, thus formed, necessitated 
 the wholly conscious organization of trades- 
 unions, with the result that we now have an 
 organized class of ruling employers opposed by 
 an organized class of ruled employes. 
 
 Here, then, at last the lines are once again 
 sharply drawn; the ancient inevitable and ir- 
 reconcilable antagonism reasserts itself. Be- 
 cause the good of the one class can be obtained 
 only by the sacrifice of the welfare of its op- 
 ponent, the interests of Capital and Labor, far 
 from being identical, are, in this view of the 
 case, irreclaimably at variance. 
 
 " What," asks the Socialist, " is the purpose 
 of the employer? " 
 
no WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 And he answers : 
 
 " To get the most labor for the least wages." 
 
 And again: 
 
 " What is the purpose of the employe? " 
 
 To which query he replies : 
 
 " To get the most wages for the least labor." 
 
 Even were he to modify such statements, he 
 would point out, as we have seen him previ- 
 ously do, that the profit of the employer is- to be 
 had only from that sum of money which lies 
 between what the workman earns and what 
 the workman is paid. Both the employer and 
 the employe may benefit from the success of 
 the employer's particular enterprise, but the 
 employer's benefit will be derived from his ex- 
 cess income over his expenditure in wages, 
 while the employe's benefit will rest entirely in 
 a raise of wages that must still be below the 
 sum that he actually earns. The more an em- 
 ploye — be he bank-clerk or ditch-digger — can 
 be made to earn for his employer over and 
 above the salary or wages (they are the same 
 thing) paid him for his work, the greater will 
 be the profits of the employer that pays those 
 wages ; the employe that does as little as he may 
 do and still hold his job, at the regular pay, 
 decreases, by just so much, his employer's 
 profits and conserves his own capital — his 
 
THE WAR OF THE CLASSES in 
 
 labor-power; and the most that may be ex- 
 pected by an employe who gives more work 
 than he is rewarded for, is a raise of salary 
 that will never be equal to the amount he 
 earns for his employer, because the employer 
 must still look for a profit only in paying for 
 his labor less than the labor earns for the em- 
 ployer's purse. 
 
 This antagonism of interests thus exists, ac- 
 cording to the Socialist, whether realized or 
 not; but, whether reaHzed or not in its causes, 
 it is at least realized, he contends, in its effects. 
 The small employe suffers and the great em- 
 ployer thrives; therefore the small employe, to 
 protect himself, organizes into trades-unions or 
 political parties and so brings the class-war- 
 fare to a concrete issue. Beneath the common 
 attacks of a general evil, all other differences 
 are now merged into cooperative resistance. 
 Gentile joins with Jew in opposing Gentile capi- 
 tal; the Protestant, whose forefathers came to 
 America to escape the Roman Church militant, 
 allies himself to the Roman Catholic against a 
 Protestant employer; white men and black, 
 laborers with every racial, political and reli- 
 gious chasm between them, bridge all of those 
 chasms so long as the issue remains, because 
 of their more or less conscious reaHzation of 
 
112 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 the fact that, in the present stage of social 
 evolution, though the law of the survival of the 
 fittest still obtains, the fittest to survive in the 
 struggle for existence are those who have 
 learned the lesson of cooperation. 
 
 The state of mind thus created does more 
 than level religious or racial barriers; it raises 
 up differing standards of good and evil, and 
 what is a virtue in the one class becomes, says 
 the Socialist, a vice in the other. In former 
 times, that slave was considered a good slave, 
 by both his master and his fellows, who went 
 through life cringing; yet the cringing member 
 of the master's class was held by both classes 
 to be beneath contempt. To-day the member 
 of the Capitalistic class that just evades the law 
 which forbids the same man to be an officer 
 in both a coal-mining and a coal-carrying com- 
 pany is pretty generally regarded as a clever 
 fellow, and is accordingly applauded; but the 
 member of the working-class that steals a bag 
 of coal from a coal-car is just as generally 
 called a thief, and just as accordingly sent to 
 jail. Much that the employer thinks right — 
 not all, but much — the employe considers evil, 
 and much that the employe regards as good — 
 not all, but much — the employer feels certain 
 is wrong. The Capitalist asserts that it is a 
 
THE WAR OF THE CLASSES 113 
 
 crime for union-workers to insist, sometimes 
 by force, upon other workers joining their 
 union, and the workers insist — though to less 
 avail — that it is wicked for the Capitalists con- 
 ducting non-union shops to blacklist other 
 Capitalists whose shops employ only union 
 men. 
 
 In brief, then, the Socialist contends that the 
 Class Struggle — 
 
 (i) Has its origin in the economic laws of 
 social evolution. 
 
 (2) Has endured since the introduction of 
 slavery into primitive communism. 
 
 (3) Has at each period of history ended in 
 the triumph of the exploited, or lower, class. 
 
 (4) Has now asserted itself between the 
 Capitalistic or employing class and the Pro- 
 letariat or employed class, inevitably and irrec- 
 oncilably creating, as of old, differing econo- 
 mic and moral viewpoints, and at last — through 
 the obtaining by the many, for the benefit of 
 all, the means of production and distribution — 
 will be able to end itself for all time to come. 
 
 So much for the statement of the general 
 theory. Now for the specific answer of that 
 theory to the criticisms with which this chap- 
 ter started. 
 
114 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 In the first place, the Capitalistic critics 
 charge that : 
 
 (i) The theory of a Class Struggle is un- 
 American. 
 
 (2) It is artificial, because there are no 
 classes in the United States. 
 
 (3) In this country men always have been, 
 are now and always will be, able to rise from 
 among the employes to a place among the em- 
 ployers, and that, therefore, there is no genuine 
 Class Struggle. 
 
 (i) The theory of a Class Struggle, says 
 the Socialist, is neither American nor un- 
 American. Being a law of social evolution, it 
 existed ages before Karl Marx defined it, just 
 as the law of physical or animal evolution was 
 at work eons previous to its announcement 
 by Darwin and Wallace ; and to say that a citi- 
 zen of the United States is unpatriotic to 
 acknowledge it is as absurd as to say — what 
 nobody does say nowadays — that it is un- 
 christian for an orthodox clergyman to ac- 
 cept the truth of Darwinism. Darwinism 
 acknowledges a certain universal law regard- 
 ing the origin of species; it does not create 
 the law : in like manner SociaHsm acknowledges 
 a certain law of social evolution, and does not 
 
THE WAR OF THE CLASSES 115 
 
 create class-bitterness. Moreover, if Socialism 
 is not American, it is at least democratic, since 
 it presupposes the ultimate triumph of the 
 majority. 
 
 (2) By much the same course of reasoning 
 the Socialist insists that there are, even in this 
 American republic, well-defined economic divi- 
 sions, which separate our people into two 
 classes, the welfare of each of which is in- 
 evitably and irreconcilably opposed to the wel- 
 fare of the other. 
 
 With the exception of the negro slaves and 
 the white slave-owners in the South before the 
 War of the Rebellion, he admits that there has 
 never been in this country a recognition in law 
 of such class divisions; but he points out that 
 a mere declaration of equality by any constitu- 
 tion cannot alter established contrary facts or 
 prevent the future establishment of such facts. 
 In monarchies, he argues, classes are legally 
 recognized and popularly defined by definite 
 name and title; but even there all that the 
 statutory law of men can do is to acknowledge 
 what the natural law of economy has already 
 created. Here in America, with the great con- 
 centration of wealth and industry in the hands 
 of the few, that same natural law, unacknowl- 
 edged though it be, has separated the poor 
 
ii6 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 from the rich, the employer from the employe, 
 and, as abroad estates and titles, as well as 
 money and industrial ownership, descend from 
 father to son, so here at home the money and 
 industrial ownership similarly descend, merely 
 carrying the actuality without the name. Our 
 " Kings of Wall Street " and our " Steel 
 Barons " are, he argues, just as much de facto 
 kings and barons as the de jure barons and 
 kings of other lands. Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan 
 is possessed of an industrial power as great as, 
 if not greater than, that of the White Czar, and 
 he and his kind rule by subtly, but effectively, 
 influencing, if they do not even openly create 
 and control, the legislatures that make our laws 
 and the courts that administer them. 
 
 Indeed, says the Socialist, even the physical 
 phase of the Class Struggle should be sufficient- 
 ly evident to every American, whether he be 
 employer or employe. Here are our organiza- 
 tions and Capitalists, such as the National As- 
 sociation of Manufacturers, formed with the 
 acknowledged design of combating organized 
 Labor, and here are the unions, such as the 
 1,700,000 strong American Federation of 
 Labor, formed, with a membership exceeding 
 2,000,000 men, for the acknowledged design of 
 combating organized Capital. We average a 
 
THE WAR OF THE CLASSES 117 
 
 thousand strikes a year — carried on by injunc- 
 tions and boycotts, lockouts and violence — 
 directly touching the welfare of the small capi- 
 talistic group and vitally affecting countless 
 numbers of the large class of wage-earners. 
 To say, in the face of such facts, that there is 
 no Class Struggle is, to the mind of the Social- 
 ist, but to cry " Peace, peace ! when there is no 
 peace." 
 
 (3) Such a struggle might, the Socialist 
 grants, be weakened, or even retarded, if it 
 were indeed continuously possible for many 
 men to rise from the class of the employed to 
 the class of the employer, but that possibility 
 is now growing daily more difficult and is des- 
 tined soon to vanish altogether. Some score 
 of years ago, it is conceded, such a progress 
 upward was not altogether rare, and was 
 pointed to by the capitalistic economists as 
 evidence that there were no classes in 
 the United States — as if the ability to 
 pass from class to class disproved the existence 
 of classes ! But the climbers, in order to secure 
 themselves in the positions that they have 
 gained, have, in the very nature of things, each 
 made it more and more arduous for any to 
 follow their upward course. Mr. Carnegie, as 
 the Socialist frequently observes, has effect- 
 
ii8 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 ually barred the ascent by way of the steel 
 industry; Mr. Rockefeller has blocked the road 
 by way of oil. What employe, it is asked, can 
 now become a cotton king, or what wage- 
 eafner a railroad baron? Regardless of the 
 personal goodwill or amiability of the few in- 
 dividuals that have reached the commercial 
 mountain-top, their very passage thither has, 
 through the automatic working of the great 
 law of industrial concentration, closed the paths 
 by which they went, and to-day that leader of 
 the working-class who is " born to command " 
 finds himself unable to lead as an employer and 
 is forced to lead as a worker, to head his own 
 class in the role of a labor-agitator or a union- 
 boss. 
 
 When the critics of the Class Struggle theory 
 contend that such a theory is an appeal to the 
 bitter passions of the mob, the Socialist again 
 replies that the formulated theory appeals to 
 nothing, since it is but the enunciation of a 
 social law, which, whether recognized as a law 
 or not, makes and always has made, its ap- 
 peal without the help of a verbal announce- 
 ment. 
 
 When the critics charge that the theory pre- 
 supposes that society is shaped solely by self- 
 ish motives, the Socialist responds that, though 
 
THE WAR OF THE CLASSES 119 
 
 as a rule class interests and individual interests 
 are identical, nevei'theless when they conflict 
 there are to be seen, on both sides, notable 
 examples of unselfishness and self-sacrifice — 
 the workingman entering upon a sympathetic 
 strike when he has no personal grievance and 
 must suffer with no hope of personal gain, and 
 the employer joining his fellows by making his 
 own shop a non-union concern when he has 
 no personal complaint against his union em- 
 ployes and must lose time and orders with no 
 expectation of direct personal benefit. 
 
 And when the critics contend that the theory 
 of a Class Struggle means a theory of economy, 
 politics and morality based upon the animosity 
 of man toward man, the Socialist makes answer 
 that, whereas, when the theory of a Class 
 Struggle was operative without being under- 
 stood, the feeling of the employe against the em- 
 ployer was indeed bitter and personal, now the 
 very preaching and explaining of that theory 
 as an inevitable law that arises from conditions 
 and not from individuals, turns the animosity 
 against the industrial system, or into the chan- 
 nel where it belongs and is most effective, and 
 away from the individual employers and out 
 of the channel where it does not belong and 
 is impotent. In a word, he points out that in 
 
120 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 such countries as Germany, where the theory is 
 most generally accepted, there is the least per- 
 sonal violence, whereas in such lands as Amer- 
 ica, where it is least generally understood, there 
 is the most personal hate. 
 
 Lastly, however, the Capitalistic economists 
 make these six charges : 
 
 (i) That, if a Class Struggle exists, it is an 
 inherent condition not to be ended by the 
 organization of individuals with no common 
 interest to unite them save an interest of op- 
 position toward a common enemy. 
 
 (2) That whatever differences there are be- 
 tween Capital and Labor are not fundamental, 
 and may be terminated by an exercise of benev- 
 olence on the part of Capital, since Capital is 
 in the position to exercise authority, since the 
 interests of Capital and Labor are actually 
 identical, and since the divergence of the two 
 is due only to a common misunderstand- 
 ing of the existence of that commonality of 
 interest. 
 
 (3) That so long as Capital and Labor — 
 though their welfare be one — are actively op- 
 posed, they are working incalculable harm to 
 the rest of the nation, to the People at large, 
 because, when the employer and employe quar- 
 rel, the consumer has to pay the piper. 
 
THE WAR OF THE CLASSES 121 
 
 (4) That the Law guarantees justice to both 
 sides. 
 
 (5) That Labor, organizing into unionism, 
 disregards its more important internecine dif- 
 ferences of race and rehgion, and becomes 
 tyrannical by denying the personal liberty of 
 the employer to run his own business as he 
 chooses, and by limiting the personal liberty 
 of the worker, which should insure him the 
 right to sell his own labor wheresoever, and at 
 whatsoever price, he sees fit. 
 
 (6) That the ultimate triumph of Labor is 
 disproved by the fact that Capital continues to 
 win the majority of strikes — ;Capital, law-abid- 
 ing, American and unorganized, though op- 
 posed to Labor, violent, un-American and 
 organized. 
 
 We shall consider the Socialist's replies to 
 these charges ad seriatim. 
 
 (i) That, if a Class Struggle exists, it is 
 an inherent condition not to be ended by the 
 organization of individuals with no common 
 interest to unite them save an interest of op- 
 position toward a common enemy. 
 
 Having, by the arguments previously given, 
 established to his own satisfaction that a" Class 
 Struggle does exist both in the United States 
 
122 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 and throughout the civihzed world at large, the 
 Socialist admits that such a struggle is inherent 
 in Capitalistic society, but adds that the struggle 
 must end that form of society for a better, 
 precisely as it ended for a better primitive com- 
 munism, medieval feudalism and every other 
 social order into which a Class Struggle was 
 by nature injected. 
 
 Nobody denies, he says, the advance of the 
 democratic form of government. Once that 
 form of government is thoroughly established, 
 the concentration of wealth bars the escape by 
 climbing upward of the employe from his own 
 class, makes the Capitalistic class grow steadily 
 smaller and the Proletariat steadily larger. 
 Thus, as political parties necessarily exist only 
 because they represent the economic needs of 
 a social class, the republic becomes naturally 
 divided into two poHtical parties, the Capital- 
 istic class and its friends on the one hand and 
 the employed class upon the other; an involun- 
 tary and automatic organization of individuals 
 results, and as soon as this organization, 
 through propaganda and education, realizes its 
 own needs, its inherent antagonism to the op- 
 posing party and its vast majority in the bal- 
 lot-box, it will employ that majority for the 
 accomplishment of what it believes to be the 
 
THE WAR OF THE CLASSES 123 
 
 welfare of the majority, for the satisfaction 
 of its own needs and for the overthrow of its 
 opponents. 
 
 In the United States, says the Socialist, the 
 RepubUcan party, which was formed to express 
 the economic needs of the opponents of chattel- 
 slavery, has, since the satisfaction of those 
 needs, naturally become the representative of 
 an entirely different class — of the Capitalistic 
 class. Similarly the Democratic party, which 
 once expressed the economic needs of the slave- 
 holders, passed, when chattel-slavery was 
 abolished, to the expression of the economic 
 needs of the small business-man, and, now that 
 the concentration of wealth is wiping out the 
 small business-man, and has already made him 
 a negligible quantity politically, must either 
 lend its name to the expression of another class, 
 or else altogether disappear — a theory that 
 seems to the Socialist to be demonstrated by the 
 fact that, in the last two presidential campaigns, 
 the Democracy came before the voters of the 
 country with a platform so thoroughly capital- 
 istic as to have, to all intents and purposes, no 
 vital point of issue with that of the Republicans. 
 There will thus, the Socialist foresees, eventually 
 be formed two parties — under whatever names 
 — the one representing the employing class and 
 
124 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 the other representing the employed class, the 
 one seeking to maintain Capitalism and the 
 other, the majority party of the great army of 
 Labor — united precisely because of the sole 
 common interest of a common opposition to a 
 common enemy — finally establishing that 
 Socialism which, by the destruction of classes, 
 will forever end the Class Struggle. 
 
 (2) That whatever differences there are be- 
 tween Capital and Labor are not fundamental, 
 and may be terminated by an exercise of benev- 
 olence on the part of Capital, since Capital 
 is in the position to exercise authority, since 
 the interests of Capital and Labor are actually 
 identical, and since the divergence of the two 
 is due to a common misunderstanding of the 
 existence of that commonality of interest. 
 
 The first assertion of this charge the Socialist 
 has already denied. The differences between 
 Capital and Labor are fundamental, he says, 
 because the interests of Capital and Labor are 
 fundamentally opposed, Capital naturally de- 
 siring to get the most work for the least money, 
 and Labor, just as naturally, desiring to get the 
 most money for the least work. It therefore 
 follows, he says, that the Class Struggle can- 
 not be ended by the exercise of benevolence 
 
THE WAR OF THE CLASSES 125 
 
 upon the side of either party to the struggle, 
 since Capital cannot relinquish its interests 
 without ceasing to be Capital and ending 
 Capitalism in Socialism, and Labor cannot sur- 
 render its interests without ceasing to be Labor, 
 in the modern political-economic sense of that 
 term, and ending Capitalism by a reversion to 
 feudalism. Thus neither Capital nor Labor is 
 in a position to exercise, in this direction, its 
 authority. 
 
 In reply to the assertion that, in the words 
 of John Mitchell — echoed by the philanthropic 
 Mark Hanna — there is " no fundamental an- 
 tagonism between the laborer and the capi- 
 talist," that their interests are identical, the 
 Socialist repeats his argument that the Capi- 
 talist's interest is to secure a profit, and that a 
 profit cannot be secured so long as an employe 
 is paid in wages all that he earns in labor, since 
 then the employer would only " quit even," be, 
 that is, without profit and just where he 
 started; and that these dififerences can be the 
 result of a mutual misunderstanding is denied 
 by the Socialist because he says the situation is 
 plain upon its face. In his view, the issue is 
 thus joined : 
 
 " I want more money for my work," says 
 the wage-earner. 
 
126 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 " I won't give it to you, because it would 
 either cut down or wipe out my profit," replies 
 the employer. " You must take what I give 
 you or quit working for me." 
 
 The one wants to be given more, the 
 other wants to give less: a condition which, 
 says the Socialist, admits of small misunder- 
 standing ! 
 
 (3) That so long as Capital and Labor — 
 though their welfare be one — are actively op- 
 posed, they are working incalculable harm to 
 the rest of the nation, to the People at large, 
 because when the employer and employe quar- 
 rel, the consumer has to pay the piper. 
 
 To the mind of the Socialist, the fallacy of 
 this charge lies in its assumption that there is, 
 in the United States, a separate class known 
 as " The Consumer," that there is a social 
 division which neither employs nor produces, 
 but only consumes. The existence of such a 
 class the Socialist flatly denies. In the length 
 and breadth of the land there is, he asserts, no 
 single individual that is not 'either an employer 
 or an employe. Even the few men of inherited 
 wealth do not live upon their capital; they live 
 upon their incomes — unless they are soon to 
 be forced into the employed class — and their 
 
THE WAR OF THE CLASSES 127 
 
 incomes are produced, directly or indirectly, by 
 the employment of labor. The employer and 
 the employe are both consumers; the term 
 " Consumer " includes both classes, and so, 
 though the bricklayer may suffer through an 
 employer's lockout or employes' strike in the 
 sweatshops, it is necessary for the brick- 
 layer to remember that not only he but 
 the sweatshop worker too wears sweatshop 
 clothes. 
 
 Yet, continues the Socialist, this condition 
 is harder upon the workingman than upon his 
 employer, for the workingman has only his indi- 
 vidual labor to sell, whereas the employer, con- 
 trolling the workingman, can, and often does, 
 exploit the workingman both as a producer and 
 as a consumer. Up to a certain point, the 
 employer can take from one pocket of the 
 laborer what he pays into the other. If there 
 is a strike for higher wages in the slaughter- 
 houses of the meat-trust and the strikers win, 
 though wages be raised, the price of meat is 
 raised also, and the winning striker pays to 
 his employers for meat what he has won by 
 his strike, whereas, if he loses, he goes back 
 to his labors — if the employer will permit him 
 — and pays more for his meat anyhow because 
 of the rise in meat-prices consequent upon the 
 
128 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 idleness of the slaughter-houses during the 
 strike. That is one reason why the Socialist 
 contends that the wage-earners should control 
 not only production but also distribution. 
 
 (4) That the Law guarantees justice to both 
 sides. 
 
 Granted, says the Socialist. But does it 
 make good its guarantee? 
 
 The ruling class has always either controlled 
 or influenced the lawmakers, both ecclesiasti- 
 cal and civil. The church in the agricultural 
 South, where the slave-owners composed the 
 ruling class, supported negro chattel-slavery; 
 the church in the manufacturing New Eng- 
 land and Middle Atlantic States, where the 
 manufacturers composed the ruling class, op- 
 posed it. In the same manner, says the 
 Socialist, throughout the country to-day the 
 ruling class rules through the legislatures and 
 courts in its own interests, as every ruling class 
 always has done. 
 
 This is not, the Socialist believes, the result 
 of calculated knavery. He has already pointed 
 out that each class has its own ethical 
 standards; that what seems right to one seems 
 wrong to the other; and he declares that, at 
 
THE WAR OF THE CLASSES 129 
 
 least for a class, the belief is easy that the end 
 justifies the means. 
 
 In thoroughgoing oligarchies the ruling class 
 frankly rules in its own interests; in a republic 
 it cannot rule so frankly and directly, but it 
 rules for its own interests quite as effectively. 
 Time was when the statement that our great 
 Interests always bought the election to legis- 
 latures of men that they knew they could later 
 buy to vote as they chose; bought next the 
 election to Congress of men either members 
 of the Interests' governing-bodies, or else the 
 corporation-lawyers that had devised the 
 charters and other legal means whereby those 
 Interests could come into and continue exist- 
 ence in evasion of the law; bought finally 
 judges from the same rank as the Congress- 
 men and Senators, or else men whose whole 
 training and cast of mind formed a respect for 
 law at the expense of justice — time was, says 
 the Socialist, when such a statement would 
 have awakened a storm of protest. But to-day, 
 after a decade of " muck-raking " in the mag- 
 azines, and after seven years of a President 
 who, though he revived the term " muck- 
 raking," was himself, in his official capacity, 
 the greatest muck-raker of them all, these facts 
 have become so much a matter of common 
 
130 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 knowledge that the people have relegated them 
 to the columns of the " comic " press and 
 regard them — if they regard them at all — ^with 
 cynical toleration. 
 
 Instances ? The Socialist has his quiver full 
 of them; but, although he argues that, under a 
 capitalistic form of society, the laws are in- 
 evitably formed by Capitalism, his chief quar- 
 rel is with the administration of those laws. 
 He poirfts, in England, to the famous " Taff 
 Vale " case in which the Taff Vale Railway 
 Company, bringing suit against the strong 
 labor-union known as the Amalgamated Society 
 of Railway Servants, obtained a decision com- 
 pelling the Society to pay $115,000 damages 
 for losses that the company alleged it had sus- 
 tained because of a strike among those of its 
 employes who were members of the union. 
 But, in this country, he especially attacks legis- 
 lation by injunction. 
 
 Here a few instances will suffice. In the 
 great steel strike of less than a decade ago there 
 was issued an injunction that prohibited the 
 members of the Amalgamated Association of 
 Iron and Steel Workers " from peaceably dis- 
 cussing the merits of their claim with the men 
 that were at work, even though the latter might 
 raise no objection." During its fight with the 
 
THE WAR OF THE CLASSES 131 
 
 New York Sun, the members of the Inter- 
 national Typographical Union were, by an 
 injunction issued by Judge Bookstaver, for- 
 bidden to pubHsh their statement of the case 
 as a reason why the friends of unionism should 
 not advertise in a non-union paper, and the 
 same union, when it fell foul of the Buffalo 
 Express, was served with an injunction for- 
 bidding the strikers to discuss the strike or the 
 paper in any manner " which might be con- 
 strued as being against the paper," so that it 
 was even wrong for a father to advise his son 
 not to purchase a copy of the Express. 
 Similarly Justice Freeman, in New York City, 
 enjoined the members of the International 
 Cigamiakers' Union — though there had been 
 neither violence nor the threat of it — against 
 following their employers' example in publish- 
 ing arguments concerning the strike, and also 
 against calling on those employers in an en- 
 deavor to bring about a peaceable settlement* 
 It is to these examples — and to such instances 
 as the kidnapping by militiamen and the car- 
 rying out of one state and into another without 
 the formality of extradition-papers of Moyer, 
 Haywood and Pettibone, the leaders of the 
 striking Colorado miners — ^that the Socialist 
 * Spargo. 
 
132 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 appeals in answer to the declaration that the 
 Law gives a " square deal " to both employer 
 and employe. 
 
 (5) That Labor, organizing into unionism, 
 disregards its more important internecine dif- 
 ferences of race and religion, and becomes 
 tyrannical by denying the personal liberty of 
 the employer to run his own business as he 
 chooses, and limiting the personal liberty of the 
 worker which should insure him the right to 
 sell his own labor wheresoever, and at what- 
 soever price, he sees fit. 
 
 The Socialist admits that organized Labor 
 disregards the differences of race and religion 
 that exist among its members and that the 
 members themselves disregard these differ- 
 ences, though, he asserts. Capital frequently 
 seeks to prevent unionism by employing in one 
 place men of as many different tongues and 
 religions as. may be. But the Socialist is 
 equally positive that the differences of race and 
 faith are not so important, during the continu- 
 ance of present conditions, as the physical well- 
 being of the various individuals, and he is quite 
 frank in his opinion that the best way to make 
 a workman into a good citizen and a good 
 Christian, of whatever sect, is to secure for him 
 those things which unionism seeks to secure. 
 
THE WAR OF THE CLASSES 133 
 
 It is true, says the Socialist, that the unions 
 become tyrannical when they become powerful, 
 but it is also true, he insists, that it was the 
 tyranny of the employers that forced unionism 
 upon the employes. Indignantly he points to 
 the adulteration of food-products by manu- 
 facturers, to the fraud that has become, he 
 says, the rule of all " Business," and indig- 
 nantly he compares the infringement of per- 
 sonal liberty on the part of the employer with 
 the infringement of personal liberty practised 
 by the employe. The Capitalist proceeds by 
 precisely the tactics that he professes to abhor. 
 According to the Socialist, the employer 'that 
 regards trades-unionism as a plot to force 
 higher pay and shorter hours, is always ready 
 to form employers' associations for the pur- 
 pose of forcing lower wages and longer hours, 
 and while declaring that the union that forbids 
 its men to labor with a non-union laborer is 
 denying each man's " right to work as he 
 chooses," this same employer is himself black- 
 listing that fellow Capitalist of his who refuses 
 to join a capitalistic combination against the 
 employment of union men. 
 
 In brief, then, the Capitalist, from the So- 
 cialist's point of view, is, through organization 
 within his own class, limiting the personal 
 
134 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 liberty of that class by forcing its individual 
 members to combine in the war of his class 
 against the employed, and is working in that 
 war to curtail, outside of his own class, the 
 personal liberty of the employe by getting from 
 him the greatest possible amount of work for 
 the least possible amount of wages. Similarly, 
 the Socialist admits, the employe, by organi- 
 zation within his own class, limits the personal 
 liberty of that class by forcing its individual 
 members to combine with him in the war of 
 his class against the employer, seeking in that 
 war to curtail, outside of his own class, the 
 personal liberty of the employer by getting 
 from him the greatest possible amount of 
 wages for the least possible amount of work. 
 It is an inevitable course of tactics necessitated 
 by the Class Struggle, which can end only with 
 that annihilation of classes which Socialism 
 alone hopes to be able to secure. 
 
 (6) That the ultimate triumph of Labor is 
 disproved by the fact that Capital continues 
 to win the majority of strikes — Capital, law- 
 abiding, unorganized, though opposed to Labor, 
 violent, un-American and organized. 
 
 A series of battles lost does not, the Socialist 
 declares, argue the final defeat of the laboring- 
 
THE WAR OF THE CLASSES 135 
 
 class. On the contrary, the fact that the labor- 
 ing-class can continue to fight in the face of 
 these battles lost argues its inherent ability 
 finally to win. The Class Struggle is, in the 
 ultimate analysis, simply a struggle of riches 
 against poverty, and a strike is nothing more 
 nor less than an incidental siege in which each 
 side is trying to starve out the other. In a 
 capitalistic form of society, the chances of suc- 
 cess in the gentle game of starvation are 
 naturally nearly all on the side of the rich : that 
 the poor should ever win is high evidence of 
 their endurance, and that they should often lose 
 means merely that the defeated party sur- 
 renders a single citadel without surrendering a 
 single conviction; the chasm, to change our 
 figure, broadens with every strike that is lost. 
 The final decision is to be made not by striking, 
 but by voting. 
 
 Nor is Capital, insists the Socialist, law- 
 abiding. To those statutes which it has had 
 enacted for its own benefit, it is, naturally, 
 loyal. But the unions have collected not a 
 little evidence to show that to the spirit of the 
 common law it is quite as naturally false. We 
 have seen how this theory is borne out through 
 " government by injunction " ; the unions add 
 that it is customary for employers, or their 
 
136 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 henchmen, to create violence by means of that 
 most loathsome sore upon the body of modern 
 society, the private detective, who, employed by 
 the Capitalist, but posing as a striker, breaks 
 the peace for the express purpose of turning 
 popular opinion against the workers. 
 
 As for organization, says the Socialist, the 
 employing class is organized. It was tacitly 
 organized before modern trades-unionism came 
 into being; it was this tacit organization that 
 forced the formation of trades-unions, and it 
 was trades-unionism that, in turn, forced the 
 formation of those formal associations of em- 
 ployers which are now the trained troops of 
 Capitalism. 
 
 , In the first stages of competition, the weak- 
 nesses of that system gave the unions their best 
 opportunities. The employer was afraid to 
 shut up his shop lest competitors should wrest 
 from him his trade, and, consequently. Or- 
 ganized Labor won many concessions in the 
 way of better workshop conditions, shorter 
 hours and higher pay. But combination has 
 now very nearly put an end to that advantage 
 and must soon end it entirely — the sooner, of 
 course, because the unions, even if they were 
 still able to win benefits for all their members, 
 could never provide work for all the workers 
 
THE WAR OF THE CLASSES 137 
 
 and must thus always have against them what 
 Friedrich Engels called the " reserve army of 
 the unemployed." 
 
 Meanwhile, the employers, having learned 
 the trick from their opponents, are, the Social- 
 ist repeats, themselves formed into unions. 
 Under one title or another, these unions 
 parallel the trades-unions, covering nearly 
 every branch of industry and stretching from 
 ocean to ocean. Where it was once possible 
 for the striker to threaten that he would seek 
 employment of a rival manufacturer, the 
 threatened manufacturer may now say that his 
 rival will not employ the striker, because both 
 manufacturers are in an organization the rules 
 of which forbid one of its members to employ 
 men that are on a strike against another mem- 
 ber; and where it was once possible for the 
 striker to depend for financial support upon 
 his fellow-unionist in another factory, it is 
 now not uncustomary for the employer that be- 
 longs to an organization to lock out those of 
 his employes who are members of the union 
 that is striking against another employer in his 
 own organization. The Class Struggle has 
 become a war of Organized Labor against 
 Organized Capital. 
 
 There are, of course, still some employers 
 
138 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 that will not join organizations, that set their 
 small personal interests before the large 
 interests of their class. There are still some 
 workmen that are equally blind to the fact 
 that, in the long run, their personal interests 
 must best be served by loyalty to their class 
 interests. But the number of these individuals 
 is yearly, almost hourly, diminishing. Though 
 a thousand minor differences of creed and race 
 divide the members of each class, those dif- 
 ferences are becoming more and more easy to 
 forget when the finances, the very existence, of 
 the members of each class are threatened by 
 the advance of the class's rivals. Men are 
 coming to be more and more aware of their 
 duty, as a matter of class-preservation, to their 
 respective classes; the lines are being drawn 
 steadily sharper; the race, says the Socialist, 
 is becoming Class-Conscious. 
 
 It is to assist the formation of this Class- 
 Consciousness among the workers, to educate 
 the wage-earner from violence to politics, and 
 to hasten the appeal to the ballot — ^when the 
 majority, which is the employed, shall, at the 
 polls, front the minority, which is the employers 
 — ^that the Socialistic political party has been 
 formed. 
 
VI 
 
 THE APOSTLE TO THE GENTILES 
 
 " It is the cause, and not the death, that makes the 
 martyr." 
 
 — Napoleon Bonaparte. 
 
 We have now seen that SociaHsm is not an- 
 archism, communism, or the rule of a 
 bureaucracy. We have considered separately, 
 though however briefly, its economics, its con- 
 ception of human history, its attitude toward 
 Capitalism, and its theory of the War of the 
 Classes. In the logical order of things, we 
 have next to sketch the rise of this doctrine and 
 its spread into an international political party, 
 thence passing to an attempt at the description 
 of the sort of co-operative commonwealth that 
 it hopes eventually to see established. 
 
 Modern Socialism, which is to say " Sci- 
 entific Socialism," begins with Karl Marx 
 and the middle of the last century. With 
 the first oppression of man by man, man the 
 oppressed had dreamed dreams of the day 
 139 
 
I40 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 when he should be quit of man the op- 
 pressor, and man the oppressor had, in his finer 
 moments, sought the vision of the time when 
 the conditions that he bhndly followed, and 
 that so sternly shaped him, should lift from his 
 shoulders the yoke of service in the cause of 
 oppression. The quest of Utopia is the an- 
 cient quest of happiness. Forerunners, then, 
 there were, as I have previously said, a plenty, 
 and, as I have previously said, it would be a 
 pleasant task to sketch in these pages the his- 
 tory of the growth of the Great Hope. Space, 
 and the immediate purpose of this little volume, 
 forbid, however, any endeavor in that direc- 
 tion, and we must content ourselves, here and 
 now, with the bare statement of the fact that, 
 until Karl Marx began his active career as a 
 worker in the then briefly tilled field of political 
 economy. Socialism remained in what is tech- 
 nically known as the Utopian, or unreasoned, 
 state, and did not rise to the scientific, or rea- 
 soned, condition until the issue of " The Com- 
 munist Manifesto" and the publication of 
 " Das Capital." 
 
 This is a distinction that cannot too clearly 
 be kept in mind. Since his day — as Marx 
 himself, who postulated the fluidic character 
 of Society, well knew would be the case — ^there 
 
THE APOSTLE TO THE GENTILES 141 
 
 have been developments in the system that he 
 enunciated; but there have been no changes. 
 Before his day there were many men groping 
 toward the thing that he was at last to find — 
 men more or less consciously, but never quite 
 completely, giving utterance to the rule that he 
 was at last to codify; but though there were 
 many that proposed this panacea or that, many 
 who caught glimpses of one portion or another 
 of the whole, there was none who saw the thing 
 in its entirety and presented it as a natural law 
 working to an inevitable end. 
 
 Marx — the family name had once been 
 Mordechia — was born in Germany, at Treves, 
 on the fifth of May, 1818; yet, though a loyal 
 Jew by race, he was not a Hebrew by religion. 
 His mother's family had come from Hungary, 
 but had, since the seventeenth century, made 
 its home in Holland, and his father, descended 
 from two hundred years of rabbis,* was him- 
 self a lawyer of deep technical learning and 
 high professional standing, who, forced by the 
 government to choose between his practice of 
 the law and his practice of the faith, did not 
 long hesitate, in 18 14, to submit to the Chris- 
 tian rite of baptism. He had long been, at any 
 
 * " German Socialism and Ferdinand Lassalle," by W. 
 H. Dawson. 
 
142 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 rate, an enthusiastic student of Voltaire, and 
 his general attitude toward such matters seems 
 to have been transmitted to the son, who, proud 
 as he was of his race and bitter as he remained 
 against those who drove the family into the 
 formal acceptance of an alien creed, had, as a 
 matter of fact, small concern for his race's 
 theology. 
 
 The elder Marx was at first anxious that the 
 younger, brought up upon such intellectual 
 food as Homer, Racine, Diderot and Shake- 
 speare, should pursue the law, and Karl studied 
 law with commendable diligence at both the 
 university of Berlin and that of Bonn. His in- 
 dividual taste, however, lay, rather, in the di- 
 rection of philosophy and history, and these 
 subjects, which he pursued to please himself,* 
 were, naturally, the ones in which he especially 
 excelled. Even while he was an undergraduate, 
 his scholarship attracted favorable attention, 
 and, in 1841, with a thesis upon the Stoicism 
 of Epictetus,' he received the degree of Doctor 
 of Philosophy. 
 
 What Marx at first wanted to do was to lec- 
 ture at Bonn upon his specialty, and, in spite 
 of the fact that he had already felt the call to 
 
 * " Biographical Memoirs of Karl Marx," by Wilhelm 
 Liebknecht. Translation of Ernest Untermann. 
 
THE APOSTLE TO THE GENTILES 143 
 
 political, not to say revolutionary, work, he 
 even went so far as to make elaborate plans for 
 the pursuit of an academic career. Indeed, he 
 was ready to embark upon such a course when 
 a series of what, at the time, appeared to be 
 trivial incidents, showed him that scholastic 
 freedom of action, speech and thought was im- 
 possible in Prussia, and influenced him to take 
 up, as his earliest profession, the difficult and 
 dangerous pursuit of radical journalism. 
 
 Marx assumed the editorship of the 
 Rheinische Zeitung, and immediately began a 
 series of attacks upon what was then a gov- 
 ernment as stupid as it was brutal. Rival pa- 
 pers of the conservative factions plied him with 
 verbal bludgeons, but the young journalist was 
 always eager to run them through with a rapier 
 of satire that came out of every duel with a 
 sharper edge and a quicker point for further 
 usage against officialdom. Even the heavy 
 criticism of the governmental censors was no 
 match for his agile methods of attack and de- 
 fense, and to their constant threats he always 
 presented a front apparently invulnerable, un- 
 til at last, the powers succeeding in frightening 
 the owners of the paper where they could not 
 aiifright its editor, Marx was practically forced 
 to resign. 
 
144 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 Not content with the burdens of a journal- 
 ist's labors, Marx, who was ever what we call 
 " a family man," had, thus early, married a 
 girl whom he had known all his life, and who 
 was destined to be, throughout his career, the 
 most loyal of his many loyal disciples, and one 
 of the most helpful of his many helpful friends. 
 Jenny von Westphalen sprang from the titled 
 class. Her father was half Scotch, was re- 
 lated, through his mother, to the Argylls, and 
 bequeathed to his daughter certain silverware 
 . marked with the Argyll crest and motto, 
 which the economist was, years later, accused 
 of stealing from that family when, in his lean 
 London years, he tried to place it in pawn. The 
 brother of Frau Marx became a somewhat 
 notoriously reactionary Prussian Minister of 
 State, and, as a final matrimonial entangle- 
 ment, Marx was thus one day to find himself 
 the husband of the sister-in-law of Florencourt, 
 the Jesuit father and Christian Socialist. 
 
 On his own part, the deposed editor had be- 
 come a convert to Hegelianism. So far as his 
 philosophy of conduct and belief were con- 
 cerned, he was thoroughly saturated with the 
 doctrine of that now so thoroughly outworn 
 code; and of the most frequent of the legion 
 of charges, which are even yet made against 
 
THE APOSTLE TO THE GENTILES 145 
 
 him by followers of the more orthodox the- 
 ories, is the charge that postulates that, be- 
 cause the man's regard for things spiritual was 
 the regard toward such things that was com- 
 mon among the followers of Hegel in the time 
 when Hegel had any followers, Marx's the- 
 ories of political economy must, somehow, 
 therefore, be erroneous. What, however, has 
 at no time been charged against Marx is any 
 impurity of life or moral irregularity of con- 
 duct. It is by all critics admitted that his per- 
 sonal history is not only without blemish, but is 
 also full of heroic elements, and it is surely un- 
 necessary to add, to any reader that has thus 
 far followed my exposition of Socialism, that 
 Marx's self-evolved ideas of economics could, 
 in the very nature of their subject, have no de- 
 pendence upon or relation to his metaphysics. 
 
 Driven, then, from his first editorial position, 
 Marx turned to another, went to Paris, and 
 there, with Arnold Ruge, undertook the publi- 
 cation of the Deutsche-Fransoesischen Jahr- 
 buecher. Here it was that the really lasting 
 work of his life began; that he formed his ac- 
 quaintance with Heine, Proudhon and Bakunin, 
 and that he met the man who was, of all others, 
 to be the greatest sharer in his labors and his 
 laurels — Friedrich Engels. 
 
146 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 A native of Barmen, in Germany, where he 
 was born on the twenty-eighth of November, 
 1820, Engels, after a Gymnasium education, 
 had, upon serving his allotted time in the army, 
 been sent to England, where, at Manchester, 
 he was the representative of a cotton-spinning 
 business in which his father was heavily 
 interested. From this point of vantage 
 he wrote a book on the condition of the 
 EngHsh working-class, formed a friend- 
 ship with Feargus O'Connor, the Chartist 
 leader, and made a wide and sympathetic 
 acquaintance among the followers of Robert 
 Owen. 
 
 It was in Paris, in 1844, that Engels met 
 Marx and that there was formed the intellectual 
 partnership that has so firmly linked their 
 names together. When the Deutsche-Fran- 
 soesischen Jahrbuecher went the way of the 
 experiment of the Rheinische Zeitung, the two 
 men worked with Heine, in the Paris Vor- 
 waerts, and it was then that, together, they 
 wrote " The Holy Family," a pamphlet now 
 out of print, which, directed against Bruno 
 Bauer, Liebknecht describes as " a sort of pro- 
 nunciamento of their new union," and which 
 Engels has characterized as " a satirical cri- 
 tique of one of the last forms into which the 
 
THE APOSTLE TO THE GENTILES 147 
 
 German philosophical idealism of that time had 
 strayed." 
 
 Further active troubles were, however, close 
 beyond. Marx — whose rugged head with its 
 jungle of jet-black beard, mustache and hair, 
 had won him the nickname of " Mohr " among 
 his fellow-agitators — was now eyes-deep in the 
 study of political economy, slowly arriving at 
 those conclusions which he was to embody in 
 his greatest work. Yet, through his super- 
 abundant energy, he found time both to make 
 friends among the Parisians of communistic 
 tendencies and to wage, with his pen, an un- 
 ceasing war upon the Prussian government. 
 
 It was, in one sense, an unhappy combination 
 of activities. Prussia, writhing under his at- 
 tacks, used his political beliefs for a pretext 
 and brought, thereby, to bear upon Guizot an 
 influence that resulted in Marx's expulsion, for 
 a time, from Frknce. 
 
 Undismayed, Marx went at once to Brussels, 
 whither, at first, Prussian malevolence pursued 
 him in vain. He helped there in the formation 
 of those workingmen's clubs which were in 
 those days intended as the nucleus of an inter- 
 national league for the propagation of the spirit 
 of republicanism. At the Free Trade Con- 
 gress of 1846, he delivered a memorable speech 
 
148 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 in wTiich he plainly indicated his belief in the 
 world-wide identity of the interests of the wage- 
 earning class. He replied — in the French that 
 he wrote almost as easily as he wrote his na- 
 tive German — to Proiidhon's book, " The 
 Philosophy of Misery," with a brilliant utter- 
 ance that he entitled " The Misery of Phi- 
 losophy." He came out boldly with the declara- 
 tion that the emancipation of Labor must be 
 wrought by Labor's self, and he joined the 
 Communist Alliance as the best technical means 
 then at hand for the spread of his ideas. 
 
 Until Marx entered its ranks, this alliance, 
 founded by Teutonic refugees in the Paris of 
 1836, was, according to Engels, who himself be- 
 came a member, " a more or less conspiratory 
 society." With the influence of the newcomer, 
 it was, however, soon changed " into a simple 
 organization for the . . . propaganda, se- 
 cret only by force of circumstances, the first 
 organization of the German Social Democratic 
 Party." It " existed wherever there were Ger- 
 man workingmen's clubs ; in nearly all the Ger- 
 man clubs of England, Belgium, France and 
 Switzerland, and in very many clubs in Ger- 
 many, the leading members belonged to this al- 
 liance, and the part played by the alliance in 
 the growing movement of German workingmen 
 
THE APOSTLE TO THE GENTILES 149 
 
 was very important." Finally, this alliance 
 was the first " to emphasize the international 
 character of the entire labor movement, and 
 to put it into practice " by admitting men of 
 many nationalities to membership " and by 
 calling international workingmen's meetings, 
 especially in London." * 
 
 The final transformation of the Alliance 
 into an engine for international propaganda 
 was made at two of these meetings held in 
 1847. At the second of these it was decided 
 that there should be drawn up and issued a sort 
 of platform, or public announcement of the or- 
 ganization's principles, and this work, pub- 
 lished in the February of the following year, 
 was done by Marx and Engels in the now fa- 
 mous " Communist Manifesto." 
 
 For the text of that document, the reader 
 must be referred to the appendix of this vol- 
 ume. Of the joint production of this pair of 
 pioneers, Engels has modestly said that its fun- 
 damental proposition belongs to Marx. " This 
 proposition, which, in my opinion," he de- 
 clares,! " is destined to do for history what 
 Darwin's theory has done for biology, we, both 
 of us, had been gradually approaching for some 
 
 * Quoted by Liebknecht. 
 
 t Introduction to the Communist Manifesto. 
 
ISO WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 years before 1845. How far I had progressed 
 toward it is best shown by my ' Condition of 
 the Working Class in England.' But when I 
 met Marx at Brussels, in the spring of 1845, he 
 had it already worked out, and put it before 
 me." 
 
 In the somewhat enthusiastic, but not exag- 
 gerated phrases of Spargo,* " the Communist 
 Manifesto is the first declaration of an Interna- 
 tional Workingmen's Party. Its fine perora- 
 tion is a call to the workers to transcend the 
 petty divisions of nationalism and sectarian- 
 ism. — ' The proletarians have nothing to los^ 
 but their chains. They have a world to win. 
 Workingmen of all countries, unite ! ' These 
 concluding phrases of the Manifesto have be- 
 come the shibboleths of millions. They are 
 repeated with fervor by the disinherited work- 
 ers of all lands. Even in China, lately so 
 rudely awakened from the slumbering peace 
 of the centuries, they are cried. No sentences 
 ever coined in the mint of human speech have 
 held such magic power over such large num- 
 bers of men and women of so many diverse 
 races." 
 
 Finally, as for the fundamental principle that 
 Engels generously concedes to Marx, that is 
 * " Socialism,'' Chap. III. 
 
THE APOSTLE TO THE GENTILES 151 
 
 the principle which has ah-eady been explained 
 in these pages and which Engels, in his in- 
 troduction to the Manifesto, thus summarizes : 
 
 " In every historical epoch, the prevailing 
 mode of economic production and exchange, 
 and the social organization necessarily follow- 
 ing from it, form the basis upon which is built 
 up, and from which alone can be explained, 
 the political and intellectual history of that 
 epoch, . . . consequently the whole history of 
 mankind (since primitive tribal society holding 
 land in common ownership) has been a history 
 of class struggles, contests between exploiting 
 and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes." 
 
 The armed outbreak of the new spirit in 
 France, which followed so close upon the ap- 
 pearance of the Manifesto, made even Belgium 
 anything but a place of refuge. Marx was ar- 
 rested and escorted across the frontier, going 
 at once to Paris, whither the new conditions 
 now made it possible for him to return, and 
 whither, indeed, he had already been invited 
 by Flocon, a member of the new government 
 and editor of the radical Reforme. Here, 
 though he set his face sternly against the ef- 
 forts at violence made by such men as Her- 
 wegh, he became, and for several weeks re- 
 mained, an active figure. 
 
152 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 Marx's chief interest, however, even yet, 
 centered in Germany, and, when in March of 
 the same year, he came to believe that the time 
 was ripe for a realization of his dreams in that 
 country, he went at once to Cologne. In that 
 city he started the Neue Rheinische Zeitung 
 in defiant recollection of his first, venture, 
 adopting as its expressed purpose war with 
 Russia for restitution to Poland and " An In- 
 divisible Republic." With Engels, he gath- 
 ered about him an imposing editorial staff, 
 which included Ernst Dronke, author of " The 
 Secrets of Berlin," and the poet and wit, Georg 
 Weerth. The first number appeared on June 
 first, 1848, and, at least so far as went the con- 
 sternation created, was something very much 
 like the first shot at Bunker Hill. 
 
 Martial law suppressed the paper in the 
 autumn — but it reappeared. The Imperial 
 Department of Justice, growling from Frank- 
 fort, condemned one article after another — 
 but the sheet continued. The harsher the 
 criticism, the stronger were the replies, and 
 the stronger the replies, the more rapidly grew 
 the circulation. In the November of 1848, 
 following the Prussian coup d'etat, the Neue 
 Rheinische Zeitung advised the people to refuse 
 to pay taxes. Twice brought before juries, 
 
THE APOSTLE TO THE GENTILES 153 
 
 its makers were twice acquitted of the charges 
 made against them, and not until the May 
 revolution of 1849 had been ground to powder 
 did the government have the courage, once 
 and for all, to end the paper's life by direct 
 command. The last issue, the " Red Num- 
 ber," printed on flaming paper, appeared on 
 the nineteenth of May, 1849. 
 
 I have given thus much of the details of this 
 episode in Marx's career because it seemed 
 to me typical of his history up to that period 
 of it at which we have now arrived. He was, 
 in effect, upon the threshold of his final labors. 
 
 Throughout Europe the flame of rebellion 
 was flickering before a long decline. Robert 
 Blum was shot in Vienna on November ninth, 
 1849; o" the same day, and at almost the 
 same moment, Wrangel entered Berlin and 
 declared it under martial law. In the days 
 that followed the wreck of their paper, Engels 
 hurried to the Palatinate, taking his part in the 
 " constitutional campaign," and Marx, though 
 keenly aware of the inherent futility of an up- 
 rising among the radical middle class, returned 
 to Paris and upheld the hands of Ledru Rollin 
 until the historic " /j Juin " verified his fears, 
 sent Rollin into the exile — ^whither, a year pre- 
 vious, Louis Blanc had preceded him — and 
 
154 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 ended in Marx's own banishment from the 
 whole of French soil, save Bretagne, and his 
 long rest, after seven years of wandering, in 
 London. 
 
 From this time the spirit of political revolt 
 declined in Marx, and he gave more and more 
 thought to the economic revolution. Almost 
 exclusively he now devoted himself to the work 
 that he intended should crown all his previous 
 labors. A publicist he always had been and 
 ever remained; he even continued his duties in 
 the Communistic Alliance until its dissolution 
 in 1852, and in 1864 he was one of the or- 
 ganizers of the International Workingmen's 
 Association at the meeting in St. James's Hall. 
 But his real devotion, apart from that given to 
 his family, was directed toward his economic 
 work, and the story of these London years 
 is one that, no matter whether he who hears 
 it agrees or disagrees with the result of those 
 labors, must ever remain an heroic narrative of 
 steadfast love and of sole-hearted sei-vice to a 
 high ideal, through afflictions that would have 
 broken any lesser spirit, and amid a poverty 
 that would either have killed or corrupted a 
 weaker man. 
 
 Slowly and painfully the work proceeded. 
 Housed in the poorest of quarters, dependent 
 
THE APOSTLE TO THE GENTILES 155 
 
 at times almost entirely upon the weekly five 
 dollars sent him from the New York Tribune 
 in return for special economic articles written 
 in begrudged moments, Marx, supported by the 
 unfailing loyalty of his patient wife, spent long 
 days among the books in the British Museum 
 and longer nights first in copying and next in 
 codifying the notes that he had made during 
 the day. 
 
 Two little rooms in a cheap lodging-house 
 in Dean Street had to serve as the home for 
 the family. The front apartment had to pass 
 for both study and reception-room; the back 
 apartment had to serve for every other pur- 
 pose. Agony often scratched at the door, and 
 hunger often entered — hunger and, at last, 
 death. It was a time that, even after partial 
 relief had come, left its fatal wound. 
 
 In the first month of 1852 one little daughter 
 died, and then, but a few weeks later, another 
 was taken. It was Frau Marx herself who 
 wrote of this event : — * 
 
 " On Easter of the same year our poor little 
 Francisca died of severe bronchitis. Three 
 days the poor child was struggling with death. 
 It suffered so much. Its little lifeless body 
 rested in the small back room; we all moved 
 * Quoted in Liebknecht's " Memoirs.'' 
 
IS6 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 together into the front room, and, when night 
 approached, we made our beds on the floor. 
 There the three Hving children were lying at 
 our side, and we cried about the little angel 
 who rested cold and lifeless near us. The 
 death of the dear child fell into the time of the 
 most bitter poverty. ... I went to a French 
 refugee living in the vicinity, who had visited 
 us before. He gave me two pounds sterling, 
 with the friendliest sympathy. With this 
 money [they had no other] the little coffin was 
 purchased in which my poor child now slum- 
 bers peacefully. It had no cradle when it en- 
 tered the world, and the last little abode also 
 was for a long time denied it." 
 
 Marx lost several children, including two 
 boys, one after a long illness. " Well I re- 
 member," says Liebknecht, who has vividly de- 
 scribed Marx's adoration of his children, — 
 " well I remember the sad weeks of sickness 
 without hope. The death of this boy was a 
 fearful blow to Marx. The boy — called 
 ' Moosh ' (Mouche, or. fly), really Edgar, after 
 an uncle — ^was very gifted, but ailing from the 
 day of his birth — a genuine child of sorrow, 
 this boy, with the magnificent eyes and the 
 promising head that was, however, much too 
 heavy for the weak body. If poor ' Moosh ' 
 
THE APOSTLE TO THE GENTILES 157 
 
 could have obtained quiet, enduring nursing, 
 and a sojourn in the country or near the sea, 
 then, perhaps, his life might have been saved. 
 But in the existence of the exile, in the chase 
 from place to place, in the misery of London, 
 it was impossible, even with the most tender 
 love of the parents and care of the mother, to 
 make the tender little plant strong enough for 
 the struggle of existence. 
 
 " ' Moosh ' died; I shall never forget the 
 scene; the mother, silently weeping, bent over 
 the dead child. . . . Marx, in a terrible ex- 
 citement, vehemently, almost angrily, rejecting 
 all consolation, the two girls clinging to their 
 mother, crying quietly, the mother clasping 
 them convulsively, as if to hold them and de- 
 fend them against Death that had robbed her 
 of her boy. 
 
 " Then two days later came the funeral. 
 ... I in the carriage with Marx — he sat 
 there dumb; I stroked his forehead: 
 
 " ' " Mohr," you still have your wife, your 
 girls and us — and we all love you so well ! ' 
 
 " ' You cannot give me back my boy ! ' he 
 groaned — and silently we rode on to the grave- 
 yard in Tottenham Court Road. 
 
 "When the coffin — singularly large, for 
 during the illness the formerly very backward 
 
iS8 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 child had grown surprisingly — when the coffin 
 was about to be lowered into the grave, Marx 
 was so excited that I stepped to his side, 
 fearing he might jump after the coffin." 
 
 This was a part of the price that Karl Marx 
 and his wife paid for " Das Capital." 
 
 Of that great work there is here leisure to 
 say no more than has already been said in these 
 pages wherein I have tried to make clear its 
 essentials as they endure to-day. Though only 
 the first volume of all that had been planned, 
 it stands, even to those who disagree with its 
 primary conceptions, as one of the greatest and 
 most enduring works of political economy. 
 Difficult as it is to the layman, it is a classic 
 to the economist; and hard reading as it may 
 be found to be by the uninitiated, it has under- 
 gone such frequent translation into more pop- 
 ular forms as to have been, in effect, read by 
 more people than any other book of its sort 
 that was ever written. Certainly no work of 
 its particular kind has so colored the opinions 
 or affected the lives of mankind. 
 
 But the production of this book had, as I 
 
 have said, cost Marx and his wife dear. 
 
 Through the Franco-Prussian War, which 
 
 , started in 1870, three years after that volume 
 
 had been published, Marx worked, as he could 
 
THE APOSTLE TO THE GENTILES 159 
 
 no longer safely work, at his task as General 
 Secretary of the International Workingmen's 
 Association. For five years more decay con- 
 tinued its insidious approaches. On the sec- 
 ond of December, 1881, Frau Marx died with 
 the name of her husband upon her lips. " Then 
 ' Mohr ' is dead, too ! " cried Engels when he 
 heard the news — and Engels was right: the 
 iron soul of Marx was shattered at last; a 
 voyage to Algiers and the South of France 
 availed nothing and, shortly after his favorite 
 daughter, Jenny, died at the end of a brief ill- 
 ness, her father, apparently convalescing from 
 an attack of pneumonia, himself died in his 
 armchair, very quietly, on the fourteenth of 
 March, 1883. 
 
 " Marx," says Liebknecht in a noble passage 
 concerning his hero's lifework,* " had finished 
 only one volume. Only one. When the 
 lioness of the fable was ridiculed by a cat be- 
 cause she had given birth to but one cub in- 
 stead of half a dozen, she proudly answered: 
 
 '" Only one— but a lion! '" 
 
 * " Memoirs " ; Introduction. 
 
VII 
 
 THE PROPAGANDA 
 
 "Unto the angel of the church of Ephesus write; 
 ... I know thy works, and thy labor and thy 
 patience." 
 
 — The Revelation of St. John the Divine ii : 1-2. 
 
 To the International Workingmen's Associ- 
 ation had, as is pointed out by Liebknecht in 
 his introduction to the " Memoirs," fallen " the 
 task — not of directing, for this was out of the 
 question from the first — but of carrying on, or 
 rather of helping to carry on, a hopeless, yet 
 necessary, struggle against the enemies of the 
 (French) republic, and of the laboring class, 
 in as good a manner as was possible in the cir- 
 cumstances." As a natural consequence, upon 
 the wreck of the French Commune, " sup- 
 pressed by superior force," this association, 
 then the especial bete noir of all monarchists, 
 was generally outlawed throughout Europe, 
 and its connection with that Commune in a 
 160 
 
THE PROPAGANDA i6i 
 
 day when Communism was a term erroneously 
 employed to describe Socialism — ^which, as we 
 have seen, is a very different thing — is now per- 
 haps the chief reason for the popular con- 
 fusion of the theories of Karl Marx with the 
 communism known as a separate school to 
 political economy. 
 
 Be this as it may, the spirit of the Associa- 
 tion continued to prevail in spite of mandatory 
 anathemas against its name and title. Its 
 founders had seen clearly and preached openly 
 the system of Scientific Socialism, universal 
 commonality of the rights of Labor and the 
 need for Labor to seek its emancipation in its 
 own efforts. The result was inevitable : 
 names changed, but theories endured; a peace- 
 able, but determined, Socialist Party appeared 
 in the politics of one European state after an- 
 other, and so established close bonds with its 
 brother-parties everywhere else that we now 
 have what most of its supporters hope will end 
 in a great World-Party, which shall wipe out 
 the imaginary boundary lines of all countries, 
 shall obHterate all the unfounded differences of 
 race and color, and shall — by securing and con- 
 ducting for the benefit of all the means of pro- 
 duction and distribution — end in the true estab- 
 
i62 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 lishment of the Republican Brotherhood of 
 Man. 
 
 And the progress that this new and final 
 turn of the movement has made — the steady- 
 ma: ch along the quietest and yet now the most 
 effective lines — is, truly, quite enough to dis- 
 turb those whose present welfare lies in the 
 path. 
 
 In no less time than the first thirty-seven 
 years of the German Empire — that is to say, 
 from 1871 to 1907 alone — the Socialist vote 
 had increased from 124,655 to 3,258,968, and 
 the number of Socialist deputies in the 
 Reichstag had grown from two to forty- 
 three. 
 
 In France the Socialists " are a tremendous 
 power that frequently affects and sometimes 
 absolutely directs the policy of the National 
 Government; they have (January, 1909) a 
 member of the cabinet, they dominate the gov- 
 ernment of Paris; they are constantly adding 
 to their strength. Already, they have made 
 great changes in the military policy of France, 
 reducing the term of enforced military service 
 and restricting the naval programme to some- 
 thing commensurate with the resources of the 
 nation. Making their first formidable appear- 
 ance in the Chamber of Deputies in the elec- 
 
THE PROPAGANDA 163 
 
 tion of 1893, when they won forty seats, they 
 have since shown steadily increasing numbers, 
 so that now they look forward to a time 
 when they can force actual steps toward 
 disarmament and enduring international 
 peace." * 
 
 In England, where the horror of mere names 
 is stronger than anywhere else — except pos- 
 sibly in this country — and where the Socialists 
 did not want to waste time explaining away 
 the absurd popular misconceptions of their 
 title, they have organized as the" Labor Party," 
 and have won the way for a large delegation in 
 Parliament. In various cities they have has- 
 tened the spread of municipal ownership of 
 public utilities, and in national legislation they 
 have forced the passage of the Employers' Li- 
 ability Bill and the institution of Old Age Pen- 
 sions. 
 
 In Italy many of the larger cities are under 
 Socialist control, and the vote in general elec- 
 tions increased in a baker's dozen of years from 
 26,000 to 320,000. Under a restricted suffrage 
 in Austria, the same force could, after years of 
 agitation, capture, in 1904, only eleven parlia- 
 mentary seats, and yet, as soon as equal male 
 
 *"The Growing Menace of Socialism," by Charles 
 Edward Russell. Hampton's Magazine, January, 1909. 
 
i64 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 suffrage was adopted a year later, that num- 
 ber was raised to eighty-seven. 
 
 Again to quote Mr. Russell, who, it must be 
 remembered, wrote a year ago : 
 
 " In Belgium, as in Great Britain, the So- 
 cialist movement is called a Labor Party, which 
 now has thirty deputies and seven senators in 
 the National Parliament. Socialism in Belgium 
 has had a marvelous development in a prac- 
 tical way through the co-operative societies 
 which have here attained to their greatest pop- 
 ularity and efficiency. 
 
 " In Finland, where there is universal 
 suffrage for both sexes, and women sit in 
 Parliament, the Socialists have eighty deputies, 
 of whom nine are women. In Sweden there 
 are fifteen Socialist members of Parliament. In 
 Norway, at the general election of 1906, the 
 Socialist vote increased from the 30,000 cast in 
 1903 to 45,000, and ten Socialist members of 
 Parliament were elected. Denmark has 
 twenty- four Socialists in the lower house and 
 four in the upper. In Holland at the election 
 of 1906 the Socialists nearly doubled the vote, 
 and returned seven members to Parliament. 
 In Japan the Socialist movement grows steadily 
 in spite of the efforts of the government to 
 suppress it. Chili has six Socialist members 
 
THE PROPAGANDA 165 
 
 of Parliament, Argentina has one, Brazil has 
 just elected its first Socialist senator, Canada 
 has just elected its first Socialist member of 
 the Dominion Parliament. In Australia the 
 Labor Party, which is essentially socialistic, 
 holds the balance of power, and New Zealand, 
 which is the happiest and most prosperous na- 
 tion in the world, has had for seventeen years 
 a government of very strong Socialist tend- 
 encies, and has gone further than any other na- 
 tion toward adopting a full Socialist pro- 
 gramme." 
 
 And what, finally, of the United States? 
 
 Rather than lose our way in the bridle-paths 
 of those state and municipal politics which are 
 so helpful to the " Boss," who wants to confuse 
 the average voter, let us here concern ourselves 
 simply with the national field and remember 
 that we are dealing only with the Socialist 
 Party, and not with the little sect known as the 
 Socialist-Labor Party, an ineffectual and dying 
 organization that was formed for speedily de- 
 feated personal ends, and that the Socialists 
 proper everywhere repudiate. Into our na- 
 tional field, then, the Socialist Party stepped in 
 1892, nominating Simon Wing for president 
 and casting only 21,164 votes. Since then the 
 vote has grown as follows : 
 
i66 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 1892 21,164 
 
 1896 36,274 
 
 1900 87,814 
 
 1904 402,283 
 
 1908 420,464* 
 
 What force has brought about this growth? 
 What has fostered it? How is it controlled? 
 
 To each of these three questions there is one 
 answer : The Sociahst Political Machine. 
 
 The fact is that the Socialists have built up 
 what promises to be the most powerful, as it is 
 certainly the most remarkable, political machine 
 in the country. That machine is, in a word, 
 the whole rank and file of the regular members 
 of the party; for whereas the tendency of the 
 elder parties is to concentrate the power of di- 
 rection in the hands of the few, so as to add 
 force to a single blow, or a single fight — fol- 
 lowing which must come months, or years, of 
 
 * This is exclusive of the Territories. " The vote 
 of 1904," as Mr. Russell points out in the article quoted 
 above, " was a very misleading indication of Socialist 
 strength, since it comprised the votes of many thou- 
 sands of radical Democrats who were disgusted with 
 the nomination of Judge Parker and with the defeat 
 in the national convention of the radical element of 
 the party. But the vote of 1908 was purely Socialistic, 
 and may be taken as an accurate measure of the present 
 strength of the party in the United States." 
 
THE PROPAGANDA 167 
 
 recuperation and the patching up of factional 
 differences — the tendency of the younger party 
 is to divide the power among the many, giving 
 each individual a personal voice and a personal, 
 even a financial, interest in the management of 
 the whole, so as to establish the quality of en- 
 durance and perfect an organization for un- 
 remitting skirmishing, always carrying on a 
 running engagement and always ready for a 
 pitched battle. The Republican Machine is 
 now this wing or that of the Republican Party ; 
 the Democratic Machine is now the so-called 
 Conservative or the so-called Radical wing of 
 the Democratic Party; but the Socialist Ma- 
 chine is the whole Socialist Party. 
 
 In every election there are, of course, some 
 votes cast for the Socialist ticket by persons 
 not regular members of the Socialist Party, just 
 as there are many self-styled Republicans that 
 vote for Democratic candidates, and many self- 
 styled Democrats that vote for Republicans. 
 But these persons, this " floating vote," is in 
 no wise considered by the party as a whole, 
 which, like every other party, is managed by 
 the men financing it, but which, unlike any 
 other party, is equally financed by its every 
 member, rich or poor. 
 
 Whosoever is a resident of the United States, 
 
i6B WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 over the age of eighteen, and possessing a gen- 
 eral knowledge of the theories and aims of So- 
 cialism, may, if he will pay three dollars a year 
 toward the party's support, become one of its 
 members. There is no bar of sex or color; 
 the only requirement is that an applicant for 
 membership must, of course, renounce all al- 
 legiance to all other political organizations, 
 and, as the application must be passed upon by 
 the ward or county " Local " of the voting dis- 
 trict in which the applicant lives, there is in- 
 variably enforced an unwritten rule that results 
 in the rejection of the keepers of disorderly 
 saloons, or other illicit resorts, and persons of 
 bad reputation generally. 
 
 Each member is, upon joining, given a red 
 card that bears a duly certified assurance of 
 his membership. On this card there is a series 
 of blank spaces marked with the names of the 
 various months of the year, and to fill these 
 spaces each member must buy one stamp a 
 month. From the sale of these stamps comes 
 the chief revenue of the party. The national 
 body gets five cents apiece for them from the 
 State Committee ; the State Committees get ten 
 cents apiece for them from the County Com- 
 mittees ; the county committees get fifteen cents 
 apiece for them from the Local Branches — 
 
THE PROPAGANDA 169 
 
 generally called " Locals " — and the Locals get 
 twenty-five cents apiece for them from their in- 
 dividual members. It is in this manner that 
 the party receives the cost of its existence, and 
 that the members of the party, freed from the 
 sporadic and excessive " contributions " en- 
 forced by the elder political parties, actually 
 purchase the right to a voice in its manage- 
 ment. 
 
 Nor is that all. The system of dues — truly 
 a novel system in a public society, a regular 
 political party with a legal place upon the 
 ballot — is regarded as an assurance of the es- 
 sentially democratic system of its formation. 
 The members are equal in the matter of pay- 
 ments, and each member pays for what he gets. 
 There are no special plums after election; there 
 is no charity before it. Joseph Medill Patter- 
 son tells the story * of a wealthy man chosen 
 treasurer for a Socialist State Committee, who, 
 when it was found that he habitually paid from 
 his own pocket the dues of delinquent mem- 
 bers, was immediately deposed from office. 
 The dues system is thus calculated to prohibit 
 any opportunity for a demagogue to rise to in- 
 
 * " The Socialist Machine," by Joseph Medill Patter- 
 son. The Saturday Evening Post, 29th of September, 
 igo6. 
 
I70 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 fluence within the party through the power of 
 his purse. 
 
 Though there is never a permanent chairman 
 to any Socialist committee — another safeguard 
 against privileges, " rings," "^ gangs " and one- 
 man-power — there is maintained, in order to 
 garner for the whole the full fruits of the 
 propaganda-work of each member, a closely 
 organized activity that is well exemplified by 
 the conduct of the national body. Here, where 
 a vast amount of detail requires the presence 
 of an executive, the Secretary, chosen for that 
 office by referendum vote of all members of the 
 party, is in charge, and it is his duty to direct, 
 co-ordinate and bring to the highest efficiency 
 the labors of all the forces working for the 
 central committee. 
 
 There are, for example, more than a score of 
 " National Organizers " always in the field, be- 
 tween elections as well as during campaigns, 
 traveling from one end of the country to the 
 other, making speeches, delivering lectures, and 
 everywhere trying to form " Locals." It is 
 one of the tasks of the Secretary of the Na- 
 tional Committee to order the movements of 
 these organizers and to see that they interfere 
 neither with each other nor yet with the speak- 
 ers and workers sent out by the various State 
 
THE PROPAGANDA 171 
 
 Committees. Once more to quote Mr. Patter- 
 son's exposition: 
 
 " There is a deep and lofty cabinet in the 
 national office with fifty shallow drawers in it; 
 Each drawer contains a large-scale map of a 
 State or Territory, which is found to be more 
 or less thickly studded with particolored pins. 
 A red pin shows that there is a local branch 
 in that town. A white pin shows a complete 
 county organization. A black pin shows a 
 speaker has been assigned; a green, that one 
 has been asked for. The course of the speaker 
 is daily traced on the map in ink. A gray pin 
 shows there is a sympathizer in the town. 
 ' Sympathizers ' are usually first located by re- 
 quest to the national office for literature. Their 
 names and addresses are tabulated, and par- 
 ticular attention is thereafter paid to them, 
 both by the sending of literature and by the 
 personal visits of organizers who pass through 
 the town. 
 
 " The organizers make detailed daily reports 
 of their movements on prescribed blanks. 
 These reports are carefully tabulated and cross- 
 indexed. Thereafter, — when a second visit is 
 made to a town, the visiting organizer is in- 
 formed in advance by the national office as to 
 the character of the population, its attitude 
 
172 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 toward Socialism, which arguments seemed 
 most effective, what kind of literature was 
 easiest to sell, the addresses of local party mem- 
 bers, or, failing them, of sympathizers, and 
 the most suitable hotel or boarding-house. 
 
 " Receipts on the road are derived from the 
 collection and from the sale of literature. At 
 every Socialist meeting the speaker makes an 
 appeal to the audience for financial help for the 
 propaganda. Considering that the audience is 
 composed almost exclusively of working- 
 people, the results of these collections are 
 sometimes truly astonishihg. Old party poli- 
 ticians invariably laugh when they hear that 
 collections or admission fees are asked at 
 political meetings, and cannot easily believe 
 that such procedure does not drive away the 
 crowds. The fact remains that it doesn't. 
 
 " Owing to these collections and sales of 
 literature, it cost the national office only about 
 $3,000 to keep nineteen organizers on the road 
 during the past year. The organizers receive 
 three dollars per day and expenses." 
 
 What is being done on a national scale by the 
 National Committee is being done on propor- 
 tionate scales by every State Committee. The 
 rules of the party, always jealous of the demo- 
 cratic essentials of the organization as a whole. 
 
THE PROPAGANDA 173 
 
 specify that all State organizations " shall have 
 the sole jurisdiction of the members residing 
 within their respective territories, and the sole 
 control of all matters pertaining to the prop- 
 aganda, organization and financial affairs 
 within such States or Territories; the national 
 committee and sub-committees or officers 
 thereof shall have no right to interfere in such 
 matters without the consent of the respective 
 State or Territorial organizations." These 
 State organizations, and the several " Locals " 
 under them, are, therefore, carrying on an un- 
 ceasing propaganda of a similar sort; a propa- 
 ganda of education, because it is necessary that 
 a man understand Socialism before he can be- 
 come a member of the party, but a propaganda, 
 at the same time, which has groups of men 
 speaking at four or five street-corners and 
 almost as many meetings in halls, in every large 
 city each night of the year; a propaganda 
 which has its emissaries, its organizers, teach- 
 ers and preachers — working because they be- 
 lieve so much rather than because they are 
 paid so little — in every town and hamlet, in 
 every big factory and mill ; and a propaganda 
 which, very differently from that of the Repub- 
 lican and Democratic parties, keeps going at 
 top speed all the time, and on the morning after 
 
174 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 an election begins, with greater energy than in 
 the campaign just past, its labors for the next 
 — however distant — election to come. 
 
 I have already said that the Socialist Party 
 has its regular column in the official ballot, 
 but I have erred gravely if I have conveyed 
 the impression that all expected of a voting 
 party-member is that he should enter the 
 polling-booth on election day and place his mark 
 beneath the party-symbol. The party is a 
 proselyting order, and its members are expected 
 to make converts to the cause. To this end, 
 in a party that has no offices wherewith to re- 
 ward them, the members not only cast their bal- 
 lots, man the polls at elections and " get out 
 the vote " at primaries; they distribute party 
 posters and hand-bills, gather crowds to the 
 meetings and, above all — suavely, dexterously, 
 generally without loss of temper, for the value 
 of a cool head is early taught them, and always 
 with a persistence that, like the small boy, does 
 not know when it is worsted — they insinuate, 
 plead, talk and argue for Socialism throughout 
 all their business, social and family lives. 
 
 Especially do the Socialists try to make read- 
 ers. They firmly believe that if they can get 
 a man to reading books upon Socialism, even 
 anti-Socialistic books, he is as good as con- 
 
THE PROPAGANDA 175 
 
 verted. Except for the " Manifesto," they re- 
 serve Marx and Engels for the most advanced, 
 but they urge upon you Bebel the German, 
 Jaures the Frenchman, the EngHsh " Fabian 
 Essays," Bellamy the American, Vandervelde, 
 Kautsky and Liebknecht. They even recom- 
 mend — ^because of their clear expositions — the 
 antagonistic " Quintessence of Socialism " by 
 the Austrian ex-Minister of Finance, Dr. A. 
 Schaffle, and the criticisms of the later Jesuits, 
 and they tell you that, if you read much of any- 
 thing in the way of contemporary literature, 
 you will get — so great is the progress of Social- 
 ism among literary men — a good deal of the 
 pure doctrine from Zola, George Bernard 
 Shaw, H. G. Wells, Sidney Webb, Horace 
 Traubel, Eugene Wood, Jack London and 
 Howells. 
 
 The party has, also, its own journalism. 
 Apart from the many papers printed in the 
 United States in other than the English tongue, 
 there are monthly magazines, two daily news- 
 papers — the Chicago Daily Socialist and the 
 New York Call — and more than a score of 
 weeklies, two of which have a combined cir- 
 culation of over 600,000 copies. 
 
 Journalism — and schools besides. In New 
 York, for instance, there is the Rand School 
 
176 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 of Social Science. Here qualified and often 
 excellent teachers, whose regular work is for 
 the most part confined to high schools and col- 
 leges within or near the city, give exhaustive 
 courses of lectures on every subject from Eng- 
 lish Composition to Biology. Here, too, 
 where, naturally, the greatest portion of the 
 curriculum is devoted to the Socialistic view 
 of economics and history, there are classes de- 
 signed to train public speakers for the Social- 
 istic propaganda. And here, finally, in the 
 night-classes, crowd not only young men and 
 young women, but men and women of middle- 
 age and over, who, after working from dawn 
 to dusk in shops or factories, cheerfully spend 
 what is a small fee for most students, but what 
 is a large sum for these, and spend also the few 
 hours, which most other laborers give to recrea- 
 tion or dissipation — the few hours left them be- 
 tween work and sleep. Two other forces re- 
 main to be mentioned : The Intercollegiate So- 
 cialist Society and the Christian Socialist Fel- 
 lowship. 
 
 It was in September, 1905, that the Inter- 
 collegiate Socialist Society was formed in re- 
 sponse to the following call : 
 
 " In the opinion of the undersigned, the re- 
 cent remarkable increase in the Socialist vote 
 
THE PROPAGANDA 177 
 
 in America should serve as an indication to the 
 educated men and women of the country that 
 SociaHsm is a thing concerning which it is no 
 longer wise to be indifferent. 
 
 " The undersigned, regarding its aims and 
 fundamental principles with sympathy, and be- 
 lieving that in them will ultimately be found 
 the remedy for many far-reaching economic 
 evils, propose organizing an association, to be 
 known as the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, 
 for the purpose of promoting an intelligent in- 
 terest in Socialism among college men and 
 women, graduate and undergraduate, through 
 the formation of study-clubs in the colleges and 
 universities, and the encouraging of all legit- 
 imate endeavors to awaken an interest in So- 
 cialism among the educated men and women 
 of the country. 
 
 Oscar Lovell Triggs, 
 
 Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 
 
 Charlotte Perkins Oilman, 
 
 Clarence S. Darrow, 
 
 William English Walling, 
 
 J. G. Phelps Stokes, 
 
 B. O. Flower, 
 
 Leonard D. Abbott, 
 
 Jack London, 
 
 Upton Sinclair." 
 
 That the purpose of the organization thus 
 formed is being accomplished is shown by 
 
178 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 these extracts from a report of its secre- 
 tary: 
 
 " The first two years of the life of the So- 
 ciety were spent largely in the distribution of 
 printed matter, and in giving of lectures before 
 college students. During the season of 1907- 
 08 an active endeavor was made to organize 
 the graduates and undergraduates of the Amer- 
 ican colleges into groups for the study of So- 
 cialism. The progress made in this work by 
 the Society has been most encouraging, and 
 augurs well for the future. 
 
 " In the fall of 1907 the Executive Commit- 
 tee decided to employ an organizer, and in 
 January, 1908, Fred H. Merrick was chosen 
 for that position. Mr. Merrick worked 
 energetically and ably among the colleges dur- 
 ing a portion of the winter and spring terms, 
 and by May i, 1908, reported the formation of 
 study chapters at the University of Pennsyl- 
 vania, Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Barnard, 
 New York University, and New York Uni- 
 versity Law School. Mr. Merrick also visited 
 several other colleges, where he paved the way 
 for future organizations. 
 
 " During the winter Miss Mary R. Sanford 
 and Miss Helen Phelps Stokes visited, in the 
 interest of the Society, Vassal", Wellesley and 
 Bryan Mawr colleges, at each of which they 
 gave informal talks on Socialism, which elicited 
 much favorable attention. 
 
 " Under the auspices of the Society, further- 
 
THE PROPAGANDA 179 
 
 more, lectures upon social and economic prob- 
 lems were delivered during the year in several 
 Eastern and Western colleges by Robert W. 
 Bruere, Morris Hillquit, Robert Hunter, Ed- 
 mund Kelly, John Spargo and J. G. Phelps 
 Stokes." 
 
 The Christian Socialist Fellowship, which is 
 not directly connected with the Socialist Party, 
 has an organization extending throughout the 
 country. It includes in its membership clergy- 
 men of nearly evei-y Christian denomination 
 and has its own magazine, The Christian So- 
 cialist, a fortnightly. Choosing for its motto 
 " The Golden Rule Against the Rule of Gold," 
 the Fellowship thus announces its purpose : 
 
 " Its object shall be to permeate Churches, 
 Denominations and other Religious Institu- 
 tions with the Social Message of Jesus; to show 
 that Socialism is the Necessary Economic Ex- 
 pression of the Christian Life; to end the Class 
 Struggle by establishing Industrial Democracy 
 and to hasten the Reign of Justice and Broth- 
 erhood upon Earth. Its members shall be 
 those who, agreeing with the Object of this 
 Movement, shall give their names for enroll- 
 ment to the Secretary. . . . 
 
 " The purpose of the Church is to cultivate 
 in every one aspirations for the higher life. 
 The purpose of Socialism ia to solve the bread- 
 
i8o WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 and-butter question, for Socialists believe that 
 only when the imperative necessities of the 
 physical being are adequately attended to can 
 the race as a whole be led to live upon a higher 
 plane. 
 
 " The Christian Socialist Fellowship has 
 been organized for the purpose of bringing into 
 closer harmony the Socialist movement and the 
 Church. Socialists need more of the moral en- 
 thusiasm of the Church, and to keep ever in 
 mind that their cause is only a means to an end 
 — the satisfying of the physical that the moral 
 and spiritual may bud and blossom. And the 
 Church may well lay more emphasis upon the 
 social message of Jesus. Somehow the aver- 
 age workingman cannot understand how it is 
 right (i.e., ethically moral) for the few 
 (some of whom call themselves Christians) to 
 live day after day in prodigal luxury, while so 
 many are fighting starvation year after year, 
 for the teaching of the Church is, ' Love thy 
 neighbor as thyself.' But every-day practice 
 under our competitive system is : Beat the other 
 fellow at the game and thus win success in 
 life. Now, Socialists maintain that the Broth- 
 erhood of Man can only be possible when the 
 present . . . system is changed to the co- 
 operative system. This idea was splendidly 
 voiced by Frances E. Willard, sainted founder 
 of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, 
 in her last annual address : 
 
 " ' What the Socialist desires is that the 
 co-operation of humanity should control all 
 
THE PROPAGANDA i8i 
 
 production. Beloved comrades, this is the 
 higher way; it eliminates the motives for a 
 selfish life; it enacts into our every-day living 
 the ethics of Christ's gospel. Nothing else can 
 bring the glad day of universal brotherhood. 
 It is Christianity applied.' 
 
 " Not one man in a hundred believes that the 
 teachings of Jesus can be applied in every-day 
 practice. Socialists do ! " 
 
 These, then, are the chief of the active, or- 
 ganized forces that are to-day carrying on the 
 Socialistic propaganda in the United States, 
 and these, without comment, I have set forth 
 as nearly as possible from the point of view of 
 the men that direct them. Whatever they may 
 be of good or of evil, none of us who considers 
 them, and who remembers the vast unorganized 
 forces of discontent with existing conditions, 
 can wonder that even so conservative and Cap- 
 italistic a publication as the New York Tribune 
 should, editorially, declare : 
 
 " Every sensible student of contemporary 
 history, every thoughtful and broad-minded 
 man, be he a Capitalist or a manufacturer (sic), 
 territorial magnate, merchant, professional 
 politician or patriotic statesman, has by this 
 time become convinced that Socialism is here 
 to stay, that it is a public issue which is bound, 
 
i82 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 in the natural course of events, to become more 
 and more important and absorbing as the years 
 go by, that it cannot be evaded, and that it is as 
 idle to dream of crushing it as was the endeavor 
 of Don Quixote to stop the sails of the wind- 
 mills." 
 
VIII 
 
 THE CO-OPERATIVE COMMONWEALTH 
 
 " For even when we were with you, this we com- 
 manded you, if any man would not work, neither 
 should he eat." 
 
 — St. Paul : // Thessalonians iii : lO. 
 
 Socialism, as we now know, regards the So- 
 cialistic State as a stage inevitably to be reached 
 in the onward march of evolution. We have 
 seen, too, how the Socialist regards the past, 
 how he views the present economic system and 
 how, by organization into political and religious 
 parties, he is endeavoring to assist the process 
 of nature by the co-operation of humanity. It 
 is left us, therefore, to consider the general 
 character of the goal toward which we are thus 
 believed to be progressing, the broad outlines 
 of the Co-operative Commonwealth. 
 
 Do not suppose, however, that this task is 
 one either to be lightly undertaken or to be 
 easily acquitted. Mark Twain to the con- 
 trary notwithstanding, the profession of the 
 183 
 
i84 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 prophet has its dangers, and these dangers are 
 infinitely multiplied when one comes to talk 
 of a matter that must, in the last analysis, be, 
 of its own nature, a subject of slow growth and 
 of ready change at the will of the majority of 
 voters. I shall, then, be dogmatic only upon 
 points whereon the greater number of Social- 
 istic writers are in agreement. 
 
 Foundation 
 
 Broadly speaking, the Socialistic State must, 
 according to these writers, be essentially 
 democratic; the creation of the majority, 
 it must naturally be the ultimate of republi- 
 canism. 
 
 Society, says the Socialist, is compdsed of 
 closely united individuals, of a legion of units, 
 each unit having its rights as a unit, and each 
 unit having its duties as a portion of the total. 
 It is the result, in other words, of a double 
 contest, every individual struggling on the one 
 hand for his own freedom and development, 
 and working, on the other, for association with 
 his fellows — the at-least-partial expression of 
 that co-operation which, in all the activities of 
 life, is the determining factor of fatness for 
 survival. The object of the Socialist State 
 
CO-OPERATIVE COMMONWEALTH 185 
 
 would thus be the estabHshment of a more or 
 less perfect harmony between the liberty of the 
 one and the welfare of the many. 
 
 Let us consider this in more detail. It will 
 at once be observed that the Socialist neither 
 presupposes the individual equality of all man- 
 kind nor desires a body of paternalistic law 
 that would be without that recognition of per- 
 sonal freedom which is the fundamental theory 
 of democracy. Many romancers, and one or 
 two philosophers, overlooking this condition, 
 have, of course, painted the Co-operative Com- 
 monwealth as a state wherein all men would be 
 made equal by force of statutory restraints, a 
 state to which any thinking man — Socialist or 
 non-Socialist — would infinitely prefer absolute 
 monarchy; but the Scientific Socialist simply 
 recognizes the impossibility of perfect liberty 
 in imperfect humanity, sees that, as Mill has 
 put it, the liberty of the many — though that 
 alone — ^must circumscribe the liberty of the 
 one, and seeks as his ideal government that 
 system which shall grant the greatest amount 
 of freedom for the benefit of the individual 
 with the least amount of restraint for the bene- 
 fit of society. 
 
 Again : all men, from this point of view, are 
 alike both in their individual needs of food, 
 
i86 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 clothes and shelter, and their social needs, co- 
 operatively satisfied, of protection, production 
 and distribution. But all men, from this point 
 of view, are unlike in character, tastes, intel- 
 lectual ability, spiritual strength and physical 
 efficiency. The most, therefore, that a democ- 
 racy can give them — the provision that it should 
 guarantee them — is an equality of opportunity 
 to work at such tasks as best suit each worker 
 to receive the full value of his product. Gov- 
 ernmental artifice cannot make individual 
 equality; but it can and should so provide that 
 every man be rewarded in equal proportion for 
 the work, whether great or small, that it calls 
 upon him to perform; it can and should grant 
 equality of opportunity for the ultimate de- 
 velopment of the variously endowed or ham- 
 pered individuals that have created it, and that 
 it controls; and it can and should insist upon an 
 equality of obligation among those individuals 
 to the body of society at large. To quote three 
 luminous phrases from Spargo : * 
 
 " Socialism, instead of being defined as an 
 attempt to make men equal, might perhaps be 
 more justly and accurately defined as a social 
 system based upon the natural inequalities of 
 mankind. . . . Not human equality, but equal- 
 * " Socialism " : Chap. IX. 
 
CO-OPERATIVE COMMONWEALTH 187 
 
 ity of opportunity to prevent the creation of 
 artificial inequalities by privilege is the essence 
 of Socialism. . . . This is the problem of so- 
 cial justice: to insure to each the same social 
 opportunities, to secure from each the same 
 obligations toward all." 
 
 A form of government based upon such 
 premises must, the Scientific Socialist realizes, 
 come slowly. The Capitalistic system is so 
 long and so deeply rooted that little could be 
 gained by felling the tree at a blow. For every 
 large advance there must be some small setback, 
 and to suppose that a single sudden election of 
 Socialists to complete municipal, state and na- 
 tional control should solve the riddle would be 
 to suppose the sudden education of the major- 
 ity of American voters to a realization of So- 
 cialism and socialistic benefits. The Scientific 
 Socialist does not, therefore, look for a quick 
 reversal of the present order, but he does 
 look for a progressive displacement of that 
 order — here a law passed, and there a legis- 
 lator elected; here a few more voters con- 
 verted, and there a balance of power secured; 
 " precept upon precept, precept upon precept ; 
 line upon line, line upon line; here a little and 
 there a little " — ^and he does beheve that, when 
 the new order has entirely replaced the old, it 
 
i88 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 will result in a government founded upon these 
 two propositions : 
 
 " I. All men are brethren, not .merely 
 brethren in name, but brethren in fact, with a 
 common blood, common destiny, common in- 
 terests, common cause. The welfare of one of 
 us is the brotherly concern of all of us, and, be- 
 ing brethren, all war and strife and hatred 
 should cease. 
 
 " 2. The things that men need in common 
 should be owned in common and supplied for 
 the Common Good, not for private profit; there 
 should not be private ownership and control 
 of other universal necessities any more than 
 there is private ownership of the air." * 
 
 Acquisition 
 
 To facilitate the institution of a government 
 for the application of these principles — a gov- 
 ernment that, it is well to repeat, they do not 
 propose to create in a day — ^the Socialists have 
 formed themselves into the political party de- 
 scribed in the preceding chapter. The im- 
 mediate purpose of this party is to force every 
 possible concession from Capital, and to secure 
 
 * " The Growing Menace of Socialism," by Charles 
 Edward Russell. 
 
CO-OPERATIVE COMMONWEALTH 189 
 
 every possible benefit for Labor, compatible 
 with the general ideal of SociaHsm; but its ul- 
 timate purpose is to enlist in its ranks the en- 
 tire working-class, thus to secure a majority at 
 the polls and thus, eventually, to bring about the 
 industrial revolution, the economic reconstruc- 
 tion of society. 
 
 These are the means proposed for the ac- 
 quisition of political power — ^means inherently 
 in conformance, the Socialist points out, with 
 both the letter and spirit of our present form of 
 government. There is, these propagandists in- 
 sist, no question of violence involved, unless it 
 should be violence employed by Capitalism, in 
 the first instance, to withhold for the minority 
 what the majority shall have gained. The 
 means proposed for the acquisition of the in- 
 dustrial power are more complex. 
 
 In the first place, the Socialist sees well that, 
 in the Co-operative Commonwealth, all prop- 
 erty need not he collectively owned. Natural 
 monopolies, from the Socialist's viewpoint, can 
 neither be justly used for private enterprise, 
 nor, by private use, can they be most efficiently 
 employed. Land, for example, may be tilled 
 for individual purposes, but land-ownership 
 must be collective. Thus, says the Socialist, 
 we could not, under Socialism, have a Coal 
 
I90 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 Trust at once absolutely legal and absolutely 
 iniquitous ; a limited natural monopoly, making 
 a profit of $80,000,000 in the first six years of 
 its existence; controlling ninety-eight per cent, 
 of the world's anthracite product; owning the 
 railroads that carry its coal from the mines; 
 theoretically able to raise its prices to any figure, 
 and headed by a judge-owning Tartuffe, who 
 claims the Almighty as a silent — a very silent — 
 partner. Land-ownership being collective, min- 
 ing, transportation and the other industries 
 dependent upon land-ownership would, to- 
 gether with all means of communication among 
 men, be collective as well. Such property, 
 however, as is only individually used, should 
 by right be only individually owned. 
 
 There is an aphorism current among Social- 
 ists that collective ownership must end at your 
 doorstep, because it is there that private owner- 
 ship begins, and this saying is a fairly accurate 
 description of the Socialist's attitude. What 
 Socialism is seeking to eradicate is simply the 
 exploitation of one man's labor by another 
 man's power; what it is seeking to set up is 
 simply an ownership of the means of produc- 
 tion that will be just as collective as, and no 
 more collective than, the labor exercising them. 
 Consequently, though there would be a col- 
 
CO-OPERATIVE COMMONWEALTH 191 
 
 lective ownership of all industries employing 
 many workers, there would be private owner- 
 ship of all industries in which single individuals 
 employed only their own efforts, and just as a 
 man would own his own clothing, his own per- 
 sonal efifects and, under a land-lease, probably 
 his own home, so it would be recognized that, 
 if he chose to forego the advantages of co- 
 operation, no individual would be at variance 
 with the welfare of society if, again under a 
 land-lease, he worked his own shop or his own 
 farm. 
 
 But how would there be obtained control of 
 those industries which, under Socialism, must 
 be collectively owned ? How, once in political 
 power, would the majority — the workers — se- 
 cure for the nation the land and the machinery 
 of production ? 
 
 There is a pretty general fear among our 
 capitalistic descendants of the American pio- 
 neers, the first immigrants to what was then 
 the New World, that the Socialists will take the 
 land by much the same methods that the 
 revered pioneer ancestors of those capitalists 
 employed in taking land from its aboriginal 
 owners, the Indians. Prominent capitalists in 
 the Republican party have openly expressed a 
 dread lest there will be only a minority of So- 
 
192 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 cialists favorable to freeing the wage-slaves by 
 purchasing the means of production, just as 
 there was only a minority of the Republicans 
 favoring the freeing of the negro chattel-slaves 
 by purchase before the War of the Rebellion. 
 
 So far as my Socialistic reading Jias taken 
 me, there seems, however, scant ground for 
 these alarms. Mtich would, naturally, depend 
 upon the attitude of Capital when the event 
 befell. There are some writers that seem to 
 think that then, as always theretofore, re- 
 sistance to the will of the majority at the polls 
 may require disclipinary measures;* but by far 
 the larger number of authorities are divided 
 only over the problem as to whether it would 
 be better to pay whatever was asked, or what a 
 regularly authorized and properly constituted 
 board of appraisers decided to be just. 
 
 No method could, of course, be applied save 
 by the will of the majority, which is the law of 
 the republic. Seizure has, it must be granted, 
 the Spartan virtue of simplicity; and some vir- 
 tue there would also be in investigations to de- 
 cide what property-holders had, by actual earn- 
 ing, acquired valid title to the property they 
 possessed; but, in the far more likely chance 
 of purchase, either money would be obtainable 
 * See Wayland's Monthly for April, igo8, p. 3. 
 
CO-OPERATIVE COMMONWEALTH 193 
 
 through the issuance of bonds, or there could 
 be granted to the late owners privileges that, 
 ultimately, would be quite as good as gold. All 
 things considered, it appears, therefore, that, if 
 any discontent resulted, it would result only in 
 the small Capitalistic class, and, as it could thus 
 by no means equal the present discontent in the 
 large wage-earning class, the efifect upon soci- 
 ety at large would be beneficial. 
 
 Administration 
 
 With the land and the means of communica- 
 tion between men and of production and dis- 
 tribution acquired by one or other of the meth- 
 ods indicated above, the Co-operative Common- 
 wealth would now proceed to the business of 
 administration. Always recollecting our self- 
 imposed limitation — to deal only with those 
 fundamentals upon which the majority of au- 
 thorities are agreed — it is certain that the new 
 government would thus have charge of the fol- 
 lowing matters : 
 
 1. The ownership of land, water-power and 
 waterways, forests, mines, oil wells and all 
 natural resources. 
 
 2. The conduct of all railways, tramways, 
 steamboat-lines, canals, mail and express 
 
194 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 service, parcels-post, telegraph and telephone 
 lines. 
 
 3. The operation of all industrial production 
 and distribution, excepting the private in- 
 dustries previously specified. 
 
 4. The organization of the labor necessary 
 for such public service as the construction of 
 sewer-systems, roads, hospitals and schools. 
 
 5. The management of coinage, banking, 
 credit advanced for individual endeavor, and 
 mortgaging. 
 
 For the administration of these functions 
 there would be chosen, by the people, officers 
 experienced in the various specialties of which 
 they were to have charge. Every man elected 
 to office — proportional representation, of 
 course, obtaining — would, moreover, by a pro- 
 vision now in force in the Socialist Party, write 
 his resignation at the hour of his nomination 
 and place it in the hands of the party for in- 
 stant use in case a majority of his electors 
 should at any time decide that he was misman- 
 aging the affairs intrusted to his care. In that 
 manner, by the employment of this Right of 
 Recall, the constituency of any official could, 
 upon a proper vote, depose that official and 
 elect another in his stead, all officials being thus 
 directly responsible, and at every moment, to 
 
CO-OPERATIVE COMMONWEALTH 195 
 
 the voters that would elect them, and that they 
 would directly represent, and all, most likely, 
 elected not for a specified term, but for as long 
 as they continued, in the belief of the majority 
 of their constituents, publicly useful in the of- 
 fice to which they had been assigned. 
 
 Except in time of famine, plague or other 
 abnormal conditions, the laws by which these 
 officials were bound, and the duties prescribed 
 for them, would be made and defined by direct 
 legislation through popular initiative and refer- 
 endum. Even if there existed law-making 
 bodies such as city councils, state legislatures 
 and national congresses, all the ordinances or 
 statutes enacted by such bodies would thus, 
 upon proper demand, be referred to the voters 
 for indorsement, and it would, therefore, be- 
 come impossible for any court of appeal, how- 
 ever high, to set aside a law that had received 
 the approval of the people, or to sustain any 
 statute that the people had condemned. 
 
 In the meantime, argues the Socialist, the in- 
 dustrial administration, owning the means of 
 production and distribution, would be in a posi- 
 tion to distribute equally the benefits of its 
 power. In the regulation of the land, collective 
 farming would be fostered; good farmland 
 would be so conserved that the poorer grade 
 
196 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 need not be used; bad land would be irrigated 
 and fertilized, and there would be exercised a 
 jealous care of those resources which even now 
 enable the United States to export enough food- 
 stuffs to feed another large nation. The same 
 conditions would exist in the organization of 
 industries. There the benefits of combination, 
 as already exemplified by the Trusts, would be 
 developed to their greatest capacity : the hours 
 of work would be shortened,* the productive 
 forces of the individual workers would be in- 
 creased, waste would be eliminated, and — 
 though this last is not a Trust-taught lesson — 
 the trades-unions would be given administrative 
 powers in their various departments of labor. 
 
 Work, Wages and the Individual 
 
 Work would be guaranteed to each and ex- 
 acted from all. It is a fact already demon- 
 strated to the satisfaction of the Socialist that 
 the demand for labor increases with the proper 
 organization and combination of industries, 
 and this, if carried to its logical conclusion, 
 would probably permit the worker to choose 
 
 * Benjamin Franklin's estimate was that four hours* 
 daily labor by every able-bodied adult would more than 
 provide for human needs. 
 
CO-OPERATIVE COMMONWEALTH 197 
 
 only the work for which he was best fitted and 
 in which he was, therefore, the most interested. 
 The choice might be influenced on the one hand 
 by his own will and on the other by the social 
 need; but the arbitrary assignment of in- 
 dividuals would be well-nigh impossible; un- 
 pleasant tasks would be made attractive by the 
 reward of shorter hours or larger remunera- 
 tion, and as, under the collectivism that outdoes 
 profit-sharing, each worker would be rewarded 
 in the exact measure of his productive capacity, 
 no sensible man would want a highly entitled 
 position when he was better fitted for one with 
 a less sounding name. Wages, finally, whether 
 or not by some modification of the present 
 monetary system, would — to repeat — represent 
 value created rather than the lowest price of 
 living, and, — the idler being left to starve and 
 labor required of all able to perform it, — the 
 state would become the guardian, not in char- 
 ity, but in justice, of the aged and the infirm. 
 For the rest, the man that chose to hoard his 
 earnings might hoard them, and he that wanted 
 to waste might waste them; neither could, at all 
 events, bequeath accumulated wealth, and, 
 credit being wholly in the hands of the govern- 
 ment, usury would of necessity disappear. 
 These things being so, the Socialist argues. 
 
198 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 it can hardly be said that the Co-operative Com- 
 monwealth would crush the individual. Rather, 
 it would, by providing him with shorter work- 
 ing hours, furnish him with the opportunity of 
 wider self-development, and the state, far from 
 hampering the individual, would become his 
 protector. There would be assured to him 
 freedom of movement, compensation for false 
 arrest, personal privacy, liberty of dress and 
 speech, and perfect freedom in all matters of 
 religion, philosophy, science and art. 
 
 Woman and the Home 
 
 Women, says the Socialist, would be ofifered 
 precisely what is offered to men. Just as 
 working-men would be paid the full value of 
 their product, so would working-women re- 
 ceive a remuneration equal to whatsoever their 
 labor produced. No woman would, with this 
 equality of opportunity, be compelled to prosti- 
 tute herself in marriage for the mere sake of a 
 living, and the woman that did marry, having 
 thus no reasons but the highest for the forma- 
 tion of such an alliance, would, through the im- 
 proved economic condition of her husband, be 
 relieved, as he would be, of that fear of poverty 
 which Henry George well described as far 
 
CO-OPERATIVE COMMONWEALTH 199 
 
 worse than poverty itself. Whether at work 
 in the factory or in the home, woman would be 
 recognized as an economic force in the eco- 
 nomic commonwealth, and would be entitled to 
 the suffrage, and, thus for the first time in his- 
 tory finding her emancipation, would lie better 
 fitted for those duties of motherhood, properly 
 recognized and provided for by the state, which 
 nature has designed her to perform. 
 
 Much has been made of the assertion of a 
 few Socialistic writers that, in the Co-operative 
 Commonwealth, the children would be the 
 wards of the state. The fact is, however, that 
 most authorities reject this opinion, and that 
 all agree that children would, under Socialism, 
 be in an improved condition, because a develop- 
 ment of government can hardly be taken to 
 imply a shrinking of natural parental affection, 
 and because, under Socialism, the parents 
 would have more time and better opportunity 
 for the expression of their love. Certain it is 
 that, in any case, that state cannot stand which 
 would, by the wholesale, rob a father and 
 mother of their child, and that, in a society 
 where the head of a family may always earn 
 enough to support those in his natural care, 
 there would at least be obliterated the curse 
 of child labor and under-nourishment. 
 
200 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 But just as the critics condemn Socialism for 
 what they suppose to be its interference with 
 family matters in the guardianship of the chil- 
 dren resulting from marriage, so do they in- 
 veigh against it for what they assume to be its 
 refusal to interfere in that family affair, mar- 
 riage itself, from which the children result. 
 The censors do not explain this contradictory 
 attitude; they merely assume it; and one of 
 them, the omniscient ex-President of the 
 United States, has more than intimated that 
 the tendency of Socialists to regard marriage 
 as among the private contracts outside the 
 sphere of public interference must result in a 
 too easy system of divorce. 
 
 Here again we are dealing with details upon 
 which Socialistic authorities disagree, and con- 
 cerning which there can be, until some far 
 distant date, no need of agreement. However, 
 though the overwhelming majority of Social- 
 ists — including no less an authority than Jean 
 Jaures, the leader of the party in France — are 
 as violent advocates of monogamy as those 
 twice-married Protestant Bishops who forget 
 the Scriptural injunction that " a bishop must 
 be the husband of one wife," there are, never- 
 theless, certain prominent SociaHsts who would 
 forbid legal intervention in marriage, who 
 
CO-OPERATIVE COMMONWEALTH 201 
 
 would make that, the most intimate of con- 
 tracts, as dissoluble by mutual agreement as any 
 of the other possibly less irksome contracts, 
 and who would, in brief, insist upon the rela- 
 tionship as a purely private and personal af- 
 fair. There are, indeed, enough of these to 
 make their point of view worthy of some de- 
 tailed exposition. 
 
 Divorce, these Socialists reply to Mr. Roose- 
 velt, can scarcely be described as a curse of the 
 class that makes up the vast bulk of the So- 
 cialist Party. To them divorce is not easy, 
 for the excellent reason that it is expensive. 
 For precisely the same reason, it is the rich 
 who, under the system that elected Mr. Roose- 
 velt as President, most frequently, by a tacitly 
 recognized system of collusion and payment, 
 procure divorces or, without procuring them, 
 can afford the practice of polygamy. Because 
 of the " graft " that, in its lower forms, it 
 gives to the politicians of this system; because 
 of the economic conditions that, in nearly 
 every form, force the greatest number of 
 women into the business; or because of the 
 leisure class with money to seduce or wealth 
 to patronize, it is Capitalism that fosters pros- 
 titution. 
 
 "Joseph de Maistre," according to M. 
 
202 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 Jaures,* " said of the old regime of Czardom 
 . . . that it was ' despotism tempered by as- 
 sassination.' Of the family law in these bour- 
 geois days, it may be said that it is monogamy 
 tempered by adultery and varied by divorce." 
 
 " Can Mr. Roosevelt," t pursues M. Jaures, 
 " really believe that the advent of Socialism 
 would increase this corruption and this dis- 
 order? In a society of free co-operators, who 
 know no longer either the mad luxury of van- 
 ity, or the vileness and the profligacy of misery, 
 or the nervous diseases of forced labor, haunted 
 sometimes by brutal visions, or the nervous dis- 
 orders of opulent ease obsessed by morbid 
 dreams; in a society wherein every individual 
 would, by decent and well defined work, be 
 sure of being his own master, the union of 
 man and woman would have many oppor- 
 tunities to be more noble and also to be more 
 permanent, without any legal constraint and 
 without any official hypocrisy. 
 
 " If the ex-President is counting on his 
 moral anathema to arrest the march of Social- 
 ism, he is deluding himself, for the records of 
 the manners of capitalistic society furnish us 
 
 * In Van Norden's Magazine, 1909. 
 f See Theodore Roosevelt's two editorials in The 
 Outlook during March and April, igog^. 
 
CO-OPERATIVE COMMONWEALTH 203 
 
 with a too easy response. More prudent than 
 Mr. Roosevelt, our European adversaries in 
 their attacks habitually abstain from stirring 
 up this point." 
 
 But, after all, the best answer to the accusa- 
 tion that Socialists do not believe in marriage 
 seems to me to lie in the fact that, for the most 
 part, they marry. Here would, if it were one 
 of their doctrines, be a doctrine that, even in 
 our Capitalistic society, they could put into 
 practice. Yet, instead of that, they take wives 
 and bring up children, insisting that, in a Cap- 
 italistic country where less than half the fam- 
 ilies live, free from debt, in their own homes, 
 the greatest enemy to the' family is that poverty 
 which it is the chief aim of Socialism forever 
 to end. 
 
 Morals, Healthy Justice 
 
 The Socialist, it will thus be seen, believes 
 that poverty or its Capitalistic causes breed im- 
 moraHty, and it naturally follows that, as he 
 considers that he has a cure for the former, so 
 he is sure that the same cure will be efficacious 
 against the latter. His system would end, he 
 says, the most immoral thing in the world: it 
 would end war. Not only that, but it would 
 make, he asserts, no distinction between the 
 
204 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 seduced and the seducer, between the policy- 
 player and the stock gambler, between the 
 drunken workman in the gutter and the 
 drunken " good fellow " in the club. He feels 
 sure that, while regulating it by restriction and 
 inspection, he would reduce prostitution by se- 
 curing the economic freedom of all women and 
 by eradicating the politicians that now thrive 
 upon the exploitation of prostitutes. He 
 would, in a word, check most vice by killing all 
 poverty. 
 
 The same legal supervision would, as I have 
 already intimated, be exercised over all matters 
 of pubHc health: housing, street-cleaning, drain- 
 age, infection, illness generally and working 
 conditions. The system of. direct legislation 
 would provide almost instant attention to the 
 physical needs of the people, and, as the last 
 decade has supplanted the fine ideals of the 
 lawyers of the last generation by what most 
 men of every shade of political belief admit to 
 be a notorious class of gouging pettifoggers 
 and concocters of perjury, so, in the Co-opera- 
 tive Commonwealth, the Socialist hopes to-so- 
 cialize all judicial functions, maintaining them 
 for free service at the general expense and ut- 
 terly abolishing all the maze of ridiculous 
 court fees and absurd attorneys' charges that 
 
CO-OPERATIVE COMMONWEALTH 205 
 
 now tend to make any appeal to law a wound or 
 a luxury. 
 
 Education, Art and Religion 
 
 The Socialist would, also, carry, even further 
 than it is carried to-day, the system of com- 
 pulsory education. The. child being the future 
 voter and worker, his mental development is, 
 to the Socialist, of too vital an interest to soci- 
 ety at large to be left alone to the discretion of 
 individual parents, and all writers seem agreed 
 that, while every child should be taught a use- 
 ful trade, no branch of education, from the 
 kindergarten through the university, should be 
 closed to any willing and capable student. 
 
 The effect of such an ideal, and of the prom- 
 ised economic conditions surrounding it, upon 
 general culture and the specific pursuit of the 
 fine arts we are driven, all of us, immediately 
 to admit. Ruskin himself declared that art is 
 the expression of the artist's joy in his work 
 and asserted — what Mr. Howells and many an- 
 other critic has well echoed — ^that no genuine 
 art can be produced for pay or at a money- 
 price. It logically follows that, in a society 
 where life is guaranteed for a minimum of 
 labor, the practitioners of all arts would be 
 freed from the whip of necessity that is now 
 
2o6 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 their worst enemy, and that many a talent at 
 present crushed by hard labor would find the 
 leisure and opportunity requisite to the full 
 flower of development. 
 
 The place of religion among such surround- 
 ings has already been observed by the leaders 
 of the Christian Socialist Fellowship move- 
 ment and by such thinkers in the churches as 
 the Rev. Alexander Irvine, the Rev. Edward 
 M. Frank and the Rev. G. F. Gladding Hoyt. 
 Even the scarcely radical Encyclopaedia 
 Britannica pronounces as identical the ethics 
 of Christianity and those of Socialism, and, 
 though it is hardly possible that Socialism 
 would permit of religious teaching in the 
 schools, and quite certain that the Socialistic 
 State would maintain an absolute neutrality in 
 all matters religious, it is equally sure that, 
 even were his economic ideals mistaken, the 
 practical Socialist is a practical religionist, and 
 that the true practitioner of any high religion 
 must, to all intents and purposes, meet the So- 
 cialist upon common ground. 
 
 The Ultimate Attitude 
 
 So much concerning the Socialist's plan of a 
 Co-operative Commonwealth I have felt that I 
 
CO-OPERATIVE COMMONWEALTH 207 
 
 could safely set down, confining myself, for the 
 most part, to those matters upon which the 
 authorities seem agreed, and, for the rest, 
 either indicating the points that must long re- 
 main in dispute, or else presenting some 
 sketch of the diverging views. Throughout 
 my notes, however, I have kept in mind the 
 fact that the Socialist proposes that, even with 
 the acquisition of political power, nothing 
 shall be done until the public forces are ready 
 to see that it shall be done carefully and 
 thoroughly; that he expects his advance to be 
 made so slowly that, first one minor step and 
 then another being taken, the field will be 
 fully prepared by the time of the final sow- 
 ing, and that, lastly, he admits freely that the 
 mass of lesser details must, for their deter- 
 mination, wait upon the needs of the coming 
 hour. 
 
 These things being so, it would have been 
 fair to neither the Socialist nor the non-Social- 
 ist to attempt in this chapter the system of 
 arguments pro and con employed in the earlier 
 portions of this book. The censor cannot well 
 criticise what has neither occurred nor been 
 minutely planned, nor can his opponent well 
 defend it. The matter at issue between the 
 two economic schools is the matter of the past 
 
2o8 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 and present of Capitalism as seen through the 
 eyes of the Scientific Socialist, for, if the Sci- 
 entific Socialist is wrong, then there can never 
 be a Co-operative Commonwealth to discuss, 
 whereas, if he is right, an attempt at the con- 
 struction of some such commonwealth cannot 
 be retarded by argument. 
 
 There are, nevertheless, a few objections to 
 the broad idea of a Socialistic State that I find 
 most Socialists rarely fail to consider. When 
 the critic declares that the seizure of our in- 
 dustries by the State, even in return for a 
 money-payment, would be confiscation, the So- 
 cialist replies that, as our industries are now 
 the result of profit made by the exploitation of 
 labor and as most land-titles are founded upon 
 the right of conquest, this " confiscation " 
 would be either but the restitution of stolen 
 goods, or else an act of conquest quite as 
 legitimate and far more beneficial than the orig- 
 inal act. When it is asked how the Socialist 
 expects to get along without the Capitalist and 
 the man of administrative talent, the answer 
 is that the Socialist does not propose to do away 
 with the Capitalist, but with Capital; that, far 
 from banishing the Capitalist, he expects to 
 make him an active producer. And when, admit- 
 ting that the Right of Recall would put an 
 
CO-OPERATIVE COMMONWEALTH 209 
 
 end to graft and maladministration, it is still 
 objected that one government could not, even 
 with popular support, properly manage so many 
 industries, the Socialistic reply is that, since 
 one government of the people, shackled by 
 graft, privilege and a system of political prefer- 
 ment, now conducts comparatively well a postal 
 service that forms the biggest business on 
 earth, as one company now controls virtually all 
 the telegraphic and telephonic service in the 
 United States, and as one small group of men 
 — as is shown by a reference to the " Direc- 
 tory of Directors " — now manages all the great 
 trusts, all the great industries, of the country, 
 it is only reasonable to believe that the same 
 efficiency would exist in a government not only 
 for and by but actually composed of the 
 People. 
 
 Arguments for governmental control as 
 against collective ownership have, of course, 
 been fatally weakened by the history of the 
 past few years, and the list of failure in at- 
 tempts to put a federal curb upon Capitalistic 
 management of the big industries has forced 
 the old issue between private retention and pub- 
 lic acquisition. Even those who were once the 
 most hopeful and ardent advocates of national 
 control are asking who is to control the con- 
 
2IO WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 trollers and are admitting that the only true 
 control is ownership. 
 
 It is this condition that the Socialist now 
 urges against all mere Reformers. He points 
 out that as the term " Sociahsm " means 
 " Comradeship," so the term " Reform " means 
 merely repair and, in its present use, merely in- 
 dicates a desire to patch up a condition that 
 the Socialist regards as fundamentally bad. 
 The Reformer attacks the symptoms, the So- 
 cialist seeks to eradicate the disease. The en- 
 deavor to check Capitalistic rapacity by reform 
 parties has been made again and again by both 
 the Democrats and the Populists, and neither 
 the former nor the latter of these has, as a 
 reform party, even been able to go so far as to 
 get into power. The endeavor to do the same 
 thing by the election of high-minded men to 
 office has shown that such men when elected 
 were powerless, and that it is not the men but 
 the conditions that are depraved. In the past 
 few years this sort of reform, says the So- 
 cialist, has been tried upon the railroads, the 
 Standard Oil Company and the beef trust, and 
 no process has endured quite so long as even 
 the reform, from the same source, of our 
 spelling. 
 
CO-OPERATIVE COMMONWEALTH 211 
 
 The Gathering Forces 
 
 It is, indeed, through the progressive col- 
 lapse of one sanguinely hailed reform after 
 another that the Socialist believes the popular 
 mind is being prepared for the reception of the 
 theory of a complete revolution. He sees 
 every conceivable sort of cement applied to 
 the pitcher; he sees the crack growing with 
 every return of the pitcher from the well, and 
 he feels sure that, at last, the pitcher must be 
 thrown away. All the while, he is preaching, 
 talking, organizing; all the while the solidifica- 
 tion of trust with trust is seeming to prove his 
 arguments for the efficiency of combination; 
 all the while reform and regulation are becom- 
 ing more and more patently futile; all the 
 'Tvhile, in spite of philosophy and schools of 
 philanthropy, the class of the merely well-to- 
 do decreases as its members are forced back 
 among the wage-workers; the great riches of 
 the very few become greater; the cancer of 
 poverty so grows, while the price of living 
 mounts beyond all normal records, that to-day 
 in New York, for example, where the average 
 family consists of the father, mother and three 
 children, almost half of the working population 
 are earning sums under $800 a year, or less 
 
212 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 than the very smallest sum that, a year ago, was 
 considered possible — without allowance for any 
 social activity or medical service — for the barest 
 support of such a family.* 
 
 Upon these things, and the law of social evo- 
 lution that he believes them to express, the So- 
 cialist, in the last analysis, takes his stand.t 
 Reducing his contention to the briefest possible 
 terms, he declares : 
 
 * " The Standard of Living Among Working Men's 
 Families in New York City," Robert Coit Chapin. (Re- 
 port of the Russell Sage Foundation.) 
 
 t In this connection some explanation should, perhaps, 
 be offered of the " Doctrine of the Unconsumed Sur- 
 plus," and the best popular explanation of that is the 
 one offered by Charles Edward Russell in the article in 
 Hampton's Magazine to which I have already had oc- 
 casion to refer. Though any civilized country would 
 serve as an example, Mr. Russell takes the United 
 States. " This country produces," he says, " every year, 
 about four billion dollars of wealth. Labor receives in 
 wages two billion dollars. Consequently labor can con- 
 sume only one-half of the total wealth production, 
 because it can consume no more than its wages will 
 purchase. But, as the laboring-class is very much 
 greater, it is obviously impossible that the small capital- 
 istic class (comprising the remainder of the nation) 
 should consume the remainder or any considerable part 
 of it. Hence there is left two billions of wealth that is 
 shipped abroad. It goes to England, for example, in 
 the shape of wheat and food. But England is in exactly 
 the same condition of producing more than she con- 
 
CO-OPERATIVE COMMONWEALTH 213 
 
 I. That Socialism, a theory of social evolu- 
 tion enunciated by Karl Marx, is not 
 Anarchism, because Socialism demands not less 
 government of all kinds, virhich is what An- 
 archism wants, but more government of the 
 democratic kind, which is one of the things that 
 Anarchism abhors. That Socialism is not Com- 
 munism, because Communism demands that all 
 men share and share alike, whereas Socialism 
 
 sumes. Hence our unconsumed surplus and England's 
 unconsumed surplus are exchanged into cloth and steel 
 and coal and shipped somewhere else. But every nation 
 in Europe is in the same condition of producing more 
 than it consumes. Hence while the unconsumed sur- 
 pluses of England and the United States are exchanged 
 into the unconsumed surpluses of other nations, yet the 
 surplus remains always unconsumed. Eventually this 
 unconsumed surplus alights upon a country that is not 
 developed, a country that consumes more than it pro- 
 duces, and there the surplus from the developed coun- 
 tries is finally consumed and disappears. 
 
 " Good. But the number of undeveloped countries 
 is steadily diminishing and is narrowly limited. One 
 hundred years ago, or thereabouts, we were consuming 
 the surplus of other nations : now we are adding enor- 
 mously to the world's surplus. Argentina used to be 
 a consuming country, it is now a surplus-adding coun- 
 try. Japan used to be a consuming country, it is now 
 a surplusradding country. Just as rapidly as a nation 
 swings from barbarism to civilization it ceases to be a 
 surplus-consuming country and becomes a surplus-add- 
 ing country. 
 
214 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 demands that each man shall receive only the 
 complete value of what he gives. That Social- 
 ism is not Paternalism, because Paternalism 
 would sacrifice individuality and promote pau- 
 perism, whereas Socialism seeks to give equal 
 chances for individual development, and added 
 incentive to individual endeavor, while enforc- 
 ing upon each individual equal obligations to 
 all other individuals. 
 
 " What is the world to do when this process has been 
 carried only a little further and there are no more 
 surplus-consuming countries ? 
 
 " Indeed, that is an acute problem this very moment. 
 That is what is the matter with the commercial 
 world. . For the first time the world feels the 
 
 pinch. Development has changed one country after 
 another from surplus-consuming lo surplus-producing 
 countries, and there is slowly accumulating this mass of 
 unconsumed surplus with which the world knows not 
 how to deal. 
 
 " The obvious remedy is to limit production to the 
 world's consumption, which, under present conditions, 
 is what is sought when mills shut down and factories 
 cease to produce. But inasmuch as under present 
 conditions every such interruption of industry is ac- 
 companied by vast suffering and actual starvation, the 
 Socialists feel assured that here again evolution will 
 bring about the triumph of their cause, because Social- 
 ism is the only system so far devised that would adjust 
 production to consumption, just as it is the only system 
 that would abolish child labor, intemperance and 
 prostitution.'' 
 
CO-OPERATIVE COMMONWEALTH 215 
 
 2. That Socialism, first, is a theory which 
 teaches that History is the story of the great- 
 ness of the people as a mass, an expression of 
 their changing economic conditions, the result 
 of a social-evolutionary development of the 
 means of producing and exchanging the neces- 
 sities of life. That History, so considered, 
 began among primitive men with a savage 
 Communism knowing no private property and 
 destroyed by the introduction of Slavery — the 
 labor of slaves captured in war — which created 
 individual wealth and an Oligarchy. That 
 Oligarchy destroyed Slavery because, becoming 
 overburdened with slaves, it had to give them 
 personal freedom, attaching them merely to the 
 land and thus creating Feudalism. That, with 
 the subsequent growth of industry, wealth 
 passed from land-ownership to tool-ownership, 
 and the rise of Handicrafts destroyed Feudal- 
 ism, Labor becoming the slave of the tool in 
 the consequent first Stage of Capitalism. And 
 the Handicrafts were destroyed by the inven- 
 tion of time-saving machinery. Labor becoming 
 the slave of the machine-owners in this the sec- 
 ond, or Competitive Stage, of Capitalism. And 
 that, finally, the machines were combined into 
 factories, the factories (one whole branch of 
 industry) into corporations, and then several 
 
2i6 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 corporations (or several industries) into still 
 greater combinations in the present, third, or 
 Co-operative Stage of Capitalism. 
 
 3. That Socialism is, secondly, a theory- 
 teaching that, under Capitalism, the unit of 
 wealth is a Commodity — an article possessing 
 the ability to satisfy some human need or de- 
 sire so general as to make that article exchange- 
 able for other articles similarly in demand — 
 i.e., an article that has a Social-Use- Value. 
 That Capital is the ownership of Wealth (i.e., 
 Commodities) reserved for the making of more 
 wealth, which is in turn to be bartered for 
 Profit. That Use-Values, satisfying need or 
 desire, are measured by Exchange-Value. That 
 Exchange-Values are the price of Use- Values 
 in the market, the artificial measure — in the 
 terms of the commodity called Money — of the 
 Use-Values for the purpose of barter, Price 
 tending to approximate Value, but real Value 
 remaining unchanged. That Labor — since the 
 Exchange-Value of a commodity is determined 
 by the average amount of labor at the time so- 
 cially necessary for its production — creates all 
 Wealth, all Capital, and is therefore (though 
 it must be constantly renewed to create more 
 wealth) itself a commodity, producing what is 
 generally called Profit, but what is actually a 
 
CO-OPERATIVE COMMONWEALTH 217 
 
 Surplus-Value that can be sold for more than 
 Capital, providing the tools, has earned, Capital 
 thus maintaining itself and propagating its kind 
 by getting something for nothing, by pocketing 
 that Labor-created and Labor-earned Profit. 
 
 4. That, thirdly. Socialism is a theory teach- 
 ing that while these conditions have obtained 
 under Capitalism — while competition, being a 
 trade-war of the strong against the weak, is 
 ending in the conquest of the strong and the 
 setting up of combination and concentration of 
 Capital; while the continuing process has in- 
 evitably resulted in the formation of a con- 
 stantly smaller and wealthier group of Capital- 
 ists controlling a constantly larger and poorer 
 class of workers — the combinations of Capital 
 above referred to have demonstrated the eco- 
 nomic efficiency of all industrial combination 
 and have created a vast majority of voters con- 
 verted to Socialism by the active propaganda 
 of the Socialist Party. 
 
 5. That, fourthly. Socialism is a theory 
 teaching that the object of the employer is and 
 always has been to get as much work for as lit- 
 tle pay as possible. That the object of the 
 employe is and always has been to get as much 
 pay for as little work as possible. That, the 
 interests of the employer and the employe being 
 
2i8 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 thus fundamentally opposed, there has logically 
 grown up a Class Struggle, which had its origin 
 in the economic laws of social evolution, which 
 has endured since the introduction of slavery 
 into primitive communism, which has at each 
 period of history ended in the triumph of the 
 exploited or lower class, and which has now — 
 the laborer wanting the full value of his labor, 
 and the employer pocketing as his profit the 
 labor-created surplus-value — asserted itself be- 
 tween the Capitalistic or employing class, in- 
 evitably and irreconcilably creating, as of old, 
 differing economic and moral viewpoints, and 
 at last — through the obtaining, by the ballots of 
 the many for the benefit of all, the means of 
 production and distribution — will end all class 
 struggle of whatever sort in a World- Republic 
 politically assured by the Socialist Party, which 
 is a world-party, in the Co-operative Com- 
 monwealth, where men, choosing their tasks, 
 will labor hard because they will be paid the 
 exact value of their product; where the work- 
 ing-day will be shortened and eflficiency en- 
 hanced because of completed combination; 
 where leisure will be given for the free de- 
 velopment of the individual, the arts, education 
 and religion, and where vice will be practically 
 obliterated because poverty will be unknown. 
 
CO-OPERATIVE COMMONWEALTH 219 
 
 In one last word, by this means and by 
 this alone, the Socialist hopes to secure the per- 
 fection of social machinery, of society, and, as 
 only by the perfection of society can there be 
 assured the perfection of the individuals com- 
 posing society, thus and only thus, I should 
 think it would seem to the Scientific Socialist, 
 can there ever come a time when the dream of 
 the millennium, the vision of the philosophic 
 Anarchist, will be assured, and man, perfected 
 by a perfect law, rise to that condition where 
 he is above the need of all law — the socially 
 conscious, economically efficient, morally ex- 
 cellent son of God. 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO 
 
 Both the mention of the Communist Mani- 
 festo in the text of the present volume and the 
 clear exposition given by this remarkable docu- 
 ment of the viewpoint of its joint authors, Karl 
 Marx and Friedrich Engels, demands that the 
 major portion of its propositions should find, in 
 their own form, a place between the covers of 
 this book. Readers should, however, remem- 
 ber that, as it is here used, the term " Com- 
 munism " and its derivatives are not to be con- 
 fused with primitive communism. Engels 
 himself wrote in 1888: 
 
 " When it was written, we could not have 
 called it a Socialist Manifesto. By Socialists, 
 in 184;^, were understood, on the one hand, the 
 adherents of the various Utopian systems: 
 Owenites in England, Fourierists in France, 
 
222 APPENDIX 
 
 both of them already reduced to the position of 
 mere sects, and gradually dying out; on the 
 other hand, the most multifarious social quacks, 
 who, by all manner of tinkering, professed to 
 redress, without any danger to capital and 
 profit, all sorts of social grievances; in both 
 cases men outside the working class movement 
 and looking rather to the ' educated ' classes for 
 support. Whatever portion of the working 
 classes had become convinced of the insuffi- 
 ciency of mere political revolutions, and had 
 proclaimed the necessity of a total social 
 change, that portion then called itself Com- 
 munist. It was a crude, rough-hewn, purely 
 instinctive sort of Communism; still, it touched 
 the cardinal point and was powerful enough 
 among the working class to produce the 
 Utopian Communism, in France of Cabet, and 
 in Germany of Weitling. Thus, Socialism 
 was in 1847 ^ middle-class movement, Commu- 
 nism a working-class movement. Socialism 
 was, on the Continent at least, ' respectable,' 
 Communism was the very opposite. And as 
 our notion, from the very beginning, was that 
 ' the emancipation of the working class must 
 be the act of the working class itself,' there 
 could be no doubt as to which of the two 
 names we must take." 
 
 The introduction, and much that was merely 
 a programme for special political activities at 
 the time of the Manifesto's publication, has 
 
APPENDIX 223 
 
 been here omitted, and, of necessity, the text 
 has been somewhat abbreviated. 
 
 I — Bourgeois and Proletarians 
 
 The history of all hitherto existing society 
 is the history of class struggles. 
 
 Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, 
 lord and serf, guild master and journeyman, in 
 a wrord, oppressor and oppressed, stood in con- 
 stant opposition to one another. . . . 
 
 The modern bourgeois * society that has 
 sprouted from the ruins of feudal society, has 
 not done away with class antagonisms. It has 
 but established new classes, new conditions of 
 oppression, new forms of struggle. . . . 
 
 Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeois, pos- 
 sesses, however, this distinctive feature; it has 
 simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a 
 whole is more and more splitting up into two 
 great hostile camps, into two great classes di- 
 rectly facing each other : Bourgeoisie and 
 Proletariat. 
 
 From the serfs of the middle ages sprang the 
 chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From 
 these burgesses the first elements of the 
 bourgeoisie were developed. 
 
 The discovery of America, the rounding of 
 the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the ris- 
 ing bourgeoisie. The East Indian and Chinese 
 
 * By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern 
 Capitalists. 
 
224 APPENDIX 
 
 markets, the colonization of America, trade 
 with the colonies, the increase in the means of 
 exchange and in commodities generally, gave 
 to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an im- 
 pulse never before known, and thereby, to the 
 revolutionary element in the tottering feudal 
 society, a rapid development. 
 
 The feudal system of industry, under which 
 industrial production was monopolized by close 
 guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing 
 wants of the new markets. The manufactur- 
 ing system took its place. The guild masters 
 were pushed on one side by the manufacturing 
 middle class; division of labor between the dif- 
 ferent corporate guilds vanished in the face of 
 the division of labor in each single workshop. 
 
 Meantime the markets kept ever growing, 
 the demand ever rising. Even manufacture no 
 longer sufficed. Thereupon steam and machin- 
 ery revolutionized industrial production. The 
 place of manufacture was taken by the giant. 
 Modern Industry, the place of the industrial 
 middle class, by industrial millionaires, the lead- 
 ers of whole industrial armies, the modern 
 bourgeois. 
 
 Modern industry has established the world's 
 market, for which the discovery of America 
 paved the way. The market has given an im- 
 mense development to commerce, to navigation, 
 to communication by land. This development 
 has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of in- 
 dustry; and in proportion as industry, com- 
 merce, navigation, and railways extended, in 
 
APPENDIX 225 
 
 the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, 
 increased its capital, and pushed into the back- 
 ground every class handed down from the mid- 
 dle ages. 
 
 Each step in the development of the bour- 
 geoisie was accompanied by a corresponding 
 political advance of that class; An oppressed 
 class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an 
 armed and self-governing association in the 
 mediaeval commune, . . . afterwards, in the 
 period of manufacture proper, serving either 
 the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a 
 counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, 
 cornerstone of the great monarchies in general, 
 the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establish- 
 ment of Modern Industry and of the world's 
 market, conquered for itself, in the modern 
 representative State, exclusive political sway. 
 The executive of the modern State is but a 
 committee for managing the common affairs of 
 the whole bourgeoisie. 
 
 The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a 
 most revolutionary part. 
 
 The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the 
 upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patri- 
 archal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn 
 asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man 
 to his " natural superiors," and has left remain- 
 ing no other nexus between man and man than 
 naked self-interest, callous " cash payment." 
 It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of 
 religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of 
 philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of 
 
226 APPENDIX 
 
 egotistical calculation. It has resolved per- 
 sonal worth into exchange value, and in place 
 of the numberless indefeasible chartered free- 
 doms, has set up that single, unconscionable 
 freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for ex- 
 ploitation, veiled by religious and political il- 
 lusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, di- 
 rect, brutal exploitation. 
 
 The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every 
 occupation hitherto honored and looked up to 
 with reverent awe. It has converted the physi- 
 cian, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man 
 of science, into its paid wage laborers. 
 
 The bourgeoisie has torn away from the 
 family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the 
 family relation to a mere money relation. . . . 
 
 The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation 
 of the world's market given a cosmopolitan 
 character to production and consumption in 
 every country. . . . All old-established na- 
 tional industries have been destroyed or are 
 daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by 
 new industries, whose introduction becomes a 
 life and death question for all civilized nations, 
 by industries that no longer work up indigenous 
 raw material, but raw material drawn from the 
 remotest zones, industries whose products are 
 consumed, not only at home, but in every quar- 
 ter of the globe. In place of the old wants, 
 satisfied by the productions of the country, we 
 find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction 
 the products of distant lands and climes. In 
 place of the old local and national seclusion and 
 
APPENDIX 227 
 
 self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every 
 direction, universal interdependence of nations. 
 And as in material, so also in intellectual pro- 
 duction. The creations of individual nations 
 become common property. National one- 
 sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more 
 and more impossible, and from the numerous 
 national and local literatures there arises a 
 world literature. 
 
 The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement 
 of all instruments of production, by the im- 
 mensely facilitated means of communication, 
 draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into 
 civilization. The cheap prices of its com- 
 modities are the heavy artillery with which it 
 batters down all Chinese walls, with which it 
 forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred 
 of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all na- 
 tions, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bour- 
 geois mode of production; it compels them to 
 introduce what it calls civilization into their 
 midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. 
 In one word, it creates a world after its own 
 image. 
 
 The bourgeoisie has subjected the country 
 to the rule of the towns. It has created 
 enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban 
 population as compared with the rural. . . . 
 
 The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing 
 away with the scattered state of the popula- 
 tion, of the means of production and of prop- 
 erty. It has agglomerated population, central- 
 ized means of production, and has concentrated 
 
228 APPENDIX 
 
 property in a few hands. The necessary con- 
 sequence of this was political centraliza- 
 tion. . . . 
 
 We see then : The means of production and 
 of exchange on whose foundation the bour- 
 geoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal 
 society. At a certain stage in the development 
 of these means of production and of exchange, 
 the conditions under which feudal society pro- 
 duced and exchanged, the feudal organization 
 of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in 
 one word, the feudal relations of property, be- 
 came no longer compatible with the already 
 developed productive forces; they became so 
 many fetters. They had to be burst asunder. 
 
 Into their place stepped free competition, ac- 
 companied by a social and political constitution 
 adapted to it, and by the economic and political 
 sway of the bourgeois class. . . . 
 
 Modern bourgeois society with its relations 
 of production, of exchange, and of property, a 
 society that has conjured up such gigantic 
 means of production and of exchange, is like 
 .the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control 
 the powers of the nether world whom he has 
 called up by his spells. For many a decade 
 past the history of industry and commerce is 
 but the history of the revolt of modern pro- 
 ductive forces against modern conditions of 
 production, against the property relations that 
 are the conditions for the existence of the 
 bourgeoisie and of its rule. It is enough to 
 mention the commercial crises that by their 
 
APPENDIX 229 
 
 periodical return put on its trial, each time 
 more threateningly, the existence of the bour- 
 geois society. ... In these crises there 
 breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier 
 epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the 
 epidemic of overproduction. . . . The condi- 
 tions of bourgeois society are too narrow to 
 comprise the wealth created by them. And 
 how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises ? 
 On the one hand by enforced destruction of a 
 mass of productive forces; on the other, by the 
 conquest of new markets, and by the more thor- 
 ough exploitation of the old ones. That is to 
 say, by paving the way for more extensive and 
 more destructive crises, and by diminishing the 
 means whereby crises are prevented. 
 
 The weapons with which the bourgeoisie 
 felled feudalism to the ground are now turned 
 against the bourgeoisie itself. 
 
 But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the 
 weapons that bring death to itself! it has also 
 called into existence the men who are to wield 
 those weapons — the modern working class — 
 the proletarians. 
 
 ~ In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., cap- 
 ital, is developed, in the same proportion is the 
 proletariat, the modern working class, de- 
 veloped : a class of laborers, who live only so 
 long as they find work, and who find work only 
 so long as their labor increases capital. These 
 laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, 
 are a commodity, like every other article of 
 commerce, and are consequently exposed to all 
 
230 APPENDIX 
 
 the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctu- 
 ations of the market. 
 
 Owing to the extensive use of machinery 
 and to division of labor, the work of the pro- 
 letarians has lost all individual character, and, 
 consequently, all charm for the workman. He 
 becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is 
 only the most simple, most monotonous, and 
 most easily acquired knack, that is required of 
 him. Hence, the cost of production of a work- 
 man is restricted almost entirely to the means 
 of subsistence that he requires for his main- 
 tenance, and for the propagation of his race. 
 But the price of a commodity, and therefore 
 also of labor, is equal to its cost of production. 
 In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness 
 of the work increases, the wage decreases. 
 Nay, more, in proportion as the use of machin- 
 ery and division of labor increases, in the same 
 proportion the burden of toil also increases, 
 whether by prolongation of the working hours, 
 by increase of the work exacted in a given 
 time, or by increased speed of the machinery, 
 etc. 
 
 Modern industry has converted the little 
 workshop of the patriarchal master into the 
 great factory of the industrial capitahst. 
 Masses of laborers, crowded into the factory, 
 are organized like soldiers. As privates of the 
 industrial army they are placed under the com- 
 mand of a perfect hierarchy of officers and 
 sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the 
 bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State, 
 
APPENDIX 231 
 
 they are daily and hourly enslaved by the ma- 
 chine, by the overseer, and, above all, by the in- 
 dividual bourgeois manufacturer himself. . . . 
 
 The less skill and exertion of strength is im- 
 plied in manual labor, in other words, the more 
 modern industry becomes developed, the more 
 is the labor of men superseded by that of 
 women. . . . 
 
 No sooner is the exploitation of the laborer 
 by the manufacturer so far at an end that he 
 receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon 
 by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the 
 landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc. 
 
 The lower strata of the middle class — the 
 small trades-people, shopkeepers, and retired 
 tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and 
 peasants — all these sink gradually into the pro- 
 letariat, partly because their diminutive capital 
 does not sufifiice for the scale on which modern 
 industry is carried on, and is swamped in the 
 competition with the large capitalists, partly 
 because their specialized skill is rendered 
 worthless by new methods of production. Thus 
 the proletariat is recruited from all classes of 
 the population. 
 
 The proletariat goes through various stages 
 of development. With its birth begins its 
 struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first the con- 
 test is carried on by individual laborers, then 
 by the workpeople of a factory, then by the 
 operatives of one trade, in one locality, against 
 the individual bourgeois who directly exploits 
 them. . . . 
 
232 APPENDIX 
 
 At this stage the laborers still form an in- 
 coherent mass . . . broken up by their 
 mutual competition. . . . The proletarians 
 do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of 
 their enemies, the remnants of absolute mon- 
 archy, the landowners, the non-industrial 
 bourgeois, the petty bourgeoisie. Thus the 
 whole industrial movement is concentrated in 
 the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so 
 obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie. 
 
 But with the development of industry the 
 proletariat not only increases in number; it be- 
 comes concentrated in greater masses, its 
 strength grows and it feels that strength more. 
 The various interests and conditions of life 
 within the ranks of the proletariat are rnore and 
 more equalized, in proportion as machinery 
 obliterates all distinctions of labor, and nearly 
 everywhere reduces wages to the same level. 
 The growing competition among the bourgeois, 
 and the resulting commercial crises, make the 
 wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. 
 The unceasing improvement of machinery, ever 
 more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood 
 more and more precarious; the collisions be- 
 tween individual workmen and individual bour- 
 geois take more and more the character of col- 
 lisions between two classes. Thereupon the 
 workers begin to form combinations (Trades' 
 Unions) against the bourgeois. . . . 
 
 Now and then the workers are victorious, 
 but only for a time. The real fruit of their 
 battles lies not in the immediate result, but in 
 
APPENDIX 233 
 
 the ever improved means of communication 
 that are created in modern industry and that 
 places the workers of different locaHties in con- 
 tact with one another. It was just this con- 
 tact that was needed to centrahze the numerous 
 local struggles, all of the same character, into 
 one national struggle between classes. But 
 every class struggle is a political struggle. And 
 that union, to attain which the burghers of the 
 middle ages, with their miserable highways, 
 required centuries, the modern proletarians, 
 thanks to railways, achieve in a few years. 
 
 This organization of the proletarians into a 
 class, and consequently into a political party, 
 is continually being upset again by the com- 
 petition between the workers themselves. But 
 it ever rises up again; stronger, firmer, 
 mightier. It compels legislative recognition of 
 particular interests of the workers, by taking 
 advantage of the divisions among the bour- 
 geoisie itself. . . . 
 
 Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a sec- 
 tion of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, 
 so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over 
 to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion 
 of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised 
 themselves to the level of comprehending 
 theoretically the historical movement as a 
 whole. 
 
 Of all the classes that stand face to face with 
 the bourgeoisie to-day, the proletariat alone is 
 a really revolutionary class. The other classes 
 decay and finally disappear in the face of mod- 
 
234 APPENDIX 
 
 ern industry; the proletariat is its special and 
 essential product. 
 
 The lower middle class, the small manufac- 
 turer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, 
 all these fight against the bourgeoisie to save 
 from extinction their existence as fractions of 
 the middle class. They are therefore not revo- 
 lutionary, but conservative. Nay, more, they 
 are reactionary, for they try to roll back the 
 wheel of history. . . . 
 
 The " dangerous class," the social scum, that 
 passively rotting class thrown off by the lowest 
 layers of old society, may, here and there, be 
 swept into the movement by a proletarian revo- 
 lution; its conditions of life, however, prepare 
 it far more for the part of a bribed tool of 
 reactionary intrigue. . . . 
 
 All the preceding classes that got the upper 
 hand sought to fortify their already acquired 
 status by subjecting society at large to their 
 conditions of appropriation. The proletarians 
 cannot become masters of the productive forces 
 of society, except by abolishing their own 
 previous mode of appropriation. They have 
 nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; 
 their mission is to destroy all previous securi- 
 ties for, and insurances of, individual property. 
 
 All previous historical movements were 
 movements of minorities, or in the interest of 
 minorities. The proletarian movement is the 
 self-conscious, independent movement of the 
 immense majority. . . . 
 
 Though not in substance, yet in form, the 
 
APPENDIX 235 
 
 struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie 
 is at first a national struggle. The proletariat 
 of each country must, of course, first of all set- 
 tle matters with its own bourgeoisie. . . . 
 
 Hitherto every form of society has been 
 based, as we have already seen, on the antago- 
 nism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But 
 in order to oppress a class certain conditions 
 must be assured to it under which it can, at 
 least, continiie its slavish existence. The serf, 
 in the period of serfdom, raised himself to 
 membership in the commune, just as the petty 
 burgess, under the yoke of feudal absolutism, 
 managed to develop into a bourgeois. The 
 modern laborer, on the contrary, instead of 
 rising with the progress of industry, sinks 
 deeper and deeper below the conditions of ex- 
 istence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, 
 and pauperism develops more rapidly than pop- 
 ulation and wealth. And here it becomes evi- 
 dent that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer 
 to be the ruhng class in society and to impose 
 its conditions of existence upon society as an 
 overriding law. It is unfit to rule because it 
 is incompetent to assure an existence to its 
 slave within his slavery, because it cannot help 
 letting him sink into such a state that it iias 
 to feed him instead of being fed by him. . . . 
 
 The essential condition for the existence, and 
 for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the 
 formation and augmentation of capital; the 
 condition of capital is wage-labor. Wage- 
 labor rests exclusively on competition between 
 
236 APPENDIX 
 
 the laborers. The advance of industry, whose 
 involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, re- 
 places the isolation of the laborers, due to com- 
 petition, by their revolutionary combination, 
 due to association. The development of mod- 
 ern industry, therefore, cuts from under its 
 feet the very foundation on which the bour- 
 geoisie produces and appropriates products. 
 What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, 
 above all, are its own gravediggers. Its fall 
 and the victory of the proletariat are equally 
 inevitable. 
 
 II; — Proletarians and Communists 
 
 . . . We have seen above that the first step 
 in the revolution by the working class is to 
 raise the proletariat to the position of the ruling 
 class; to win the battle of democracy. 
 
 The proletariat will use its political su- 
 premacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from 
 the bourgeoisie; to centralize all instruments 
 of production in the hands of the state, i.e., 
 of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; 
 and to increase the total of productive forces 
 as rapidly as possible. 
 
 Of course, in the beginning this cannot be ef- 
 fected except by means of despotic inroads on 
 the rights of property and on the conditions of 
 bourgeois production; by means of measures, 
 therefore, which appear economically insuffi- 
 cient and untenable, but which, in the course of 
 the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate 
 
APPENDIX 237 
 
 further inroads upon the old social order, and 
 are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolu- 
 tionizing the mode of production. 
 
 These measures will, of course, be different 
 in different countries. 
 
 Nevertheless in the most advanced countries 
 the following will be pretty generally ap- 
 plicable : 
 
 1. Abolition of property in land and applica- 
 tion of all rents of land to public purposes. 
 
 2. A heavy progressive or graduated income 
 tax. 
 
 3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance. 
 
 4. Confiscation of the property of all emi- 
 grants * and rebels. 
 
 5. Centralization of credit in the hands of 
 the State, by means of a national bank with 
 State capital and an exclusive monopoly. 
 
 6. Centralization of the means of communi- 
 cation and transport in the hands of the State. 
 
 7. Extension of factories and instruments 
 of production owned by the State; the bringing 
 into cultivation of waste lands, and the im- 
 provement of the soil generally in accordance 
 with a common plan. 
 
 8. Equal liability of all to labor. Estab- 
 lishment of industrial armies, especially for 
 agriculture. 
 
 9. Combination of agriculture with manu- 
 facturing industries; gradual abolition of the 
 distinction between town and country, by a 
 
 * i.e., Runaways. 
 
238 APPENDIX 
 
 more equable distribution ©f the population 
 over the country. 
 
 lo. Free education for all children in public 
 schools. Abolition of children's factory labor 
 in its present form. Combination of education 
 with industrial production, etc. 
 
 When, in the course of development, class 
 distinctions have disappeared and all produc- 
 tion has been concentrated in the hands of a 
 vast association of the whole nation, the public 
 power will lose its political character. Politi- 
 cal power, properly so called, is merely the or- 
 ganized power of one class for oppressing an- 
 other. If the proletariat during its contest 
 with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force 
 of circumstances, to organize itself as a class, 
 if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the 
 ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by 
 force the old conditions of production, then it 
 will, along with these conditions, have swept 
 away the conditions for the existence of class 
 antagonisms, and of classes generally, and will 
 thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a 
 class. 
 
 In place of the old bourgeois society with its 
 classes and class antagonisms we shall have an 
 association in which the free development of 
 each is the condition for the free development 
 of all. . . . 
 
 . . . The proletarians have nothing to lose 
 but their chains. They have a world to win. 
 
 Workingmen of all countries, unite! 
 
II 
 
 SOCIALIST PLATFORM, PREAMBLE 
 
 AND DECLARATION OF 
 
 PRINCIPLES, 1908 
 
 DECLARATION OF PRINCIPLES 
 
 Human life depends upon food, clothing and 
 shelter. Only with these assured are freedom, 
 culture and higher human development possi- 
 ble. To produce food, clothing or shelter, land 
 and machinery are needed. Land alone does 
 not satisfy human needs. Human labor 
 creates machinery and applies it to the land 
 for the production of raw materials and food. 
 Whoever has control of land and machinery 
 controls human labor, and with it human life 
 and liberty. 
 
 To-day the machinery and the land used for 
 industrial purposes are owned by a rapidly de- 
 creasing minority. So long as machinery is 
 simple and easily handled by one man, its owner 
 cannot dominate the sources of life of others. 
 But when machinery becomes more complex 
 and expensive, and requires for its effective 
 operation the organized effort of many work- 
 ers, its influence reaches over wide circles of 
 239 
 
240 APPENDIX 
 
 life. The owners of such machinery become 
 the dominant class. 
 
 In proportion as the number of such machine 
 owners compared to all other classes decreases, 
 their power in the nation and in the world in- 
 creases. They bring ever larger masses of 
 working people under their control, reducing 
 them to the point where muscle and brain are 
 their only productive property. Millions of 
 formerly self-employing workers thus become 
 the helpless wage slaves of the industrial mas- 
 ters. 
 
 As the economic power of the ruling class 
 grows it becomes less useful in the life of the 
 nation. AH the useful work of the nation falls 
 upon the . shoulders of the class whose only 
 property is its manual and mental labor power 
 — the wage worker — or of the class who have 
 but little land and little effective machinery out- 
 side of their labor power — the small traders 
 and small farmers. The ruling minority is 
 steadily becoming useless and parasitic. 
 
 A bitter struggle over the division of the 
 products of labor is waged between the ex- 
 ploiting propertied classes on the one hand and 
 the exploited propertyless class on the other. 
 In this struggle the wage-working class cannot 
 expect adequate relief from any reform of the 
 present order at the hands of the dominant 
 class. 
 
 The wage workers are therefore the most 
 determined and irreconcilable antagonists of 
 the ruling class. They suffer most from the 
 
APPENDIX 241 
 
 curse of class rule. The fact that a few cap- 
 italists are permitted to control all the country's 
 industrial resources and social tools for their 
 individual profit, and to make the production 
 of the necessaries of life the object of com- 
 petitive private enterprise and speculation, is 
 at the bottom of all the social evils of our 
 time. 
 
 In spite of the organization of trusts, pools 
 and combinations, the capitalists are powerless 
 to regulate production for social ends. Indus- 
 tries are largely conducted in a planless man- 
 ner. Through periods of feverish activity the 
 strength and health of the workers are merci- 
 lessly used up, and during periods of enforced 
 idleness the workers are frequently reduced to 
 starvation. 
 
 The climaxes of this system of production 
 are regularly recurring industrial depressions 
 and crises which paralyze the nation every fif- 
 teen or twenty years. 
 
 The capitalist class, in its mad race for 
 profits, is bound to exploit the workers to the 
 very limit of their endurance and to sacrifice 
 their physical, moral and mental welfare to its 
 own insatiable greed. Capitalism keeps the 
 masses of workingmen in poverty, destitution, 
 physical exhaustion and ignorance. It drags 
 their wives from their homes to the mill and 
 factory. It snatches their children from the 
 playgrounds and schools and grinds their slen- 
 der bodies and unformed minds into cold dol- 
 lars. It disfigures, maims and kills hundreds 
 
242 APPENDIX 
 
 of thousands of workingmen annually in mines, 
 on railroads and in factories. It drives mil- 
 lions of workers into the ranks O'f the unem- 
 ployed and forces large numbers of them into 
 beggary, vagrancy and all forms of crime and 
 vice. 
 
 To maintain their rule over their fellow men, 
 the capitalists must keep in their pay all organs 
 of the public powers, public mind and public 
 conscience. They control the dominant parties 
 and, through them, the elected public officials. 
 They select the executives, bribe the legislatures 
 and corrupt the courts of justice. They own 
 and censor the press. They dominate the edu- 
 cational institutions. They own the nation 
 politically and intellectually just as they own it 
 industrially. 
 
 The struggle between wage workers and cap- 
 italists grows ever fiercer, and has now become 
 the only vital issue before the American peo- 
 ple. The wage-working class, therefore, has 
 the most direct interest in abolishing the capi- 
 talist system. But in abolishing the present 
 system the workingmen will free not only their 
 own class, but also all other classes of modern 
 society: The small farmer, who is to-day ex- 
 ploited by large capital more indirectly, but not 
 less effectively than is the wage laborer; the 
 small manufacturer and trader, who is engaged 
 in a desperate and losing struggle for economic 
 independence in the face of the all-conquering 
 power of concentrated capital; and even the 
 capitalist himself, who is the slave of his 
 
APPENDIX 243 
 
 wealth rather than its master. The struggle of 
 the working class against the capitalist class, 
 while it is a class struggle, is thus at the same 
 time, a struggle for the abolition of all classes 
 and class privileges. 
 
 The private ownership of the land and means 
 of production used for exploitation is the rock 
 upon which class rule is built; political govern- 
 ment is its indispensable instrument. The 
 wage workers cannot be freed from exploita- 
 tion without conquering the political power 
 and substituting collective for private owner- 
 ship of the land and means of production used 
 for exploitation. 
 
 The basis for such transformation is rapidly 
 developing within present capitalist society. 
 The factory system, with its complex machin- 
 ery and minute division of labor, is rapidly de- 
 stroying all vestiges of individual production 
 in manufacture. Modern production is already 
 very largely a collective and social process. 
 The great trusts and monopolies which have 
 sprung up in recent years have organized the 
 work and management of the principal indus- 
 tries on a national scale, and have fitted them 
 for collective use and operation. 
 
 The Socialist party is primarily an economic 
 and political movement. It is not concerned 
 with matters of religious belief. 
 
 In the struggle for freedom the interests of 
 all modern workers are identical. The strug- 
 gle is not only national, but international. It 
 embraces the world and will be carried to ulti- 
 
244 APPENDIX 
 
 mate victory by the united workers of the 
 world. 
 
 To unite the workers of the nation and their 
 aUies and sympathizers of all other classes to 
 this end is the mission of the Socialist party. 
 In this battle for freedom the Socialist party 
 does not strive to substitute working-class rule 
 for capitalist-class rule, but by working-class 
 victory to free all humanity from class-rule and 
 to realize the international brotherhood of man. 
 
 PLATFORM FOR I908 
 
 The Socialist party, in national convention 
 assembled, again declares itself as the party of 
 the working class, and appeals for the support 
 of all workers of the United States and of all 
 citizens who sympathize with the great and just 
 cause of labor. 
 
 We are at this moment in the midst of one 
 of those industrial breakdowns that periodically 
 paralyze the life of the nation. The much- 
 boasted era of our national prosperity has been 
 followed by one of general misery. Factories, 
 mills and mines are closed. Millions of men, 
 ready, willing and able to provide the nation 
 with all the necessaries and comforts of life, 
 are forced into idleness and starvation. 
 
 Within recent times the trusts and monop- 
 olies have attained an enormous and menacing 
 development. They have acquired the power 
 to dictate the terms upon which we shall be al- 
 lowed to live. The trusts Ux the prices of our 
 
APPENDIX 245 
 
 bread, meat and sugar, of our coal, oil and 
 clothing, of our raw material and machinery, 
 of all the necessities of life. 
 
 The present desperate condition of the work- 
 ers has been made the opportunity for a re- 
 newed onslaught on organized labor. The 
 highest courts of the country have within the 
 last year rendered decision after decision de- 
 priving the workers of rights which they had 
 won by generations of struggle. 
 
 The attempt to destroy the Western Federa- 
 tion of Miners, although defeated by the soli- 
 darity of organized labor and the Socialist 
 movement, revealed the existence of a far- 
 reaching and unscrupulous conspiracy by the 
 ruling class against the organizations of labor. 
 
 In their efforts to take the lives of the lead- 
 ers of the miners the conspirators violated state 
 laws and the federal constitution in a manner 
 seldom equaled even in a country so completely 
 dominated by the profit-seeking class as is the 
 United States. 
 
 The congress of the United States has shown 
 its contempt for the interests of labor as plainly 
 and unmistakably as ,have the other branches of 
 government. The laws for which the labor or- 
 ganizations have continually petitioned have 
 failed to. pass. Laws ostensibly enacted for 
 the benefit of labor have been distorted against 
 labor. 
 
 The working class of the United States can- 
 not expect any remedy for its wrongs from the 
 present ruling class or from the dominant 
 
246 APPENDIX 
 
 parties. So long as a small number of in- 
 dividuals are permitted to control the sources 
 of the nation's wealth for their private profit 
 in competition with each other and for the ex- 
 ploitation of their fellow men, industrial de- 
 pressions are bound to occur at certain inter- 
 vals. No currency reforms or other legislative 
 measures proposed by capitalist reformers can 
 avail against these fatal results of utter an- 
 archy in production. 
 
 Individual competition leads inevitably to 
 combinations and trusts. No amount of gov- 
 ernment regulation, or of publicity, or of re- 
 strictive legislation, will arrest the natural 
 course of modern industrial development. 
 
 While our courts, legislatures and executive 
 offices remain in the hands of the ruling classes 
 and their agents the government will be used in 
 the interests of these classes as against the 
 toilers. 
 
 Political parties are but the expression of 
 economic class interests. The republican, the 
 democratic and the so-called " independence " 
 parties, and all parties other than the Socialist 
 party, are financed, directed and controlled by 
 the representatives of different groups of the 
 ruling class. 
 
 In the maintenance of class government both 
 the democratic and republican parties have been 
 equally guilty. The republican party has had 
 control of the national government and has 
 been directly and actively responsible for these 
 wrongs. The democratic party, while saved 
 
APPENDIX 247 
 
 from direct responsibility by its political im- 
 potence, has shown itself equally subservient 
 to the aims of the capitalist class whenever and 
 wherever it has been in power. The old chat- 
 tel slave-owning aristocracy of the South, 
 which was the backbone of the democratic 
 party, has been supplanted by a child-slave 
 plutocracy. In the great cities of our coun- 
 try the democratic party is allied with the crim- 
 inal element of the slums as the republican 
 party is allied with the predatory criminals 
 of the palace in maintaining the interest of the 
 possessing class. 
 
 The various " reform " -movements and 
 parties which have sprung up within recent 
 years are but the clumsy expression of wide- 
 spread popular discontent. They are not based 
 on an intelligent understanding of the historical 
 development of civilization and of the economic 
 and political needs of our time. They are 
 bound to perish as the numerous middle-class 
 reform movements of the past have perished. 
 
 PROGRAM 
 
 General Demands 
 
 I — The immediate government relief of the 
 unemployed workers by building schools, by re- 
 foresting of cut-over waste lands, by reclama- 
 tion of arid tracts, and the building of canals, 
 and by extending all other useful public works. 
 All persons employed on such work shall be 
 
248 APPENDIX 
 
 employed directly by the government under 
 an eight hour workday and at the prevailing 
 union wages. The government shall also loan 
 money to states and municipalities without in- 
 terest for the purpose of carrying on public 
 works. It shall contribute to the funds of la- 
 bor organizations for the purpose of assisting 
 their unemployed members, and shall take such 
 other measures within its power as will lessen 
 the widespread misery of the workers caused 
 by the misrule of the capitalist class. 
 
 2 — ^The collective ownership of railroads, 
 telegraphs, telephones, steamship lines and all 
 other means of social transportation and com- 
 munication and all land. 
 
 3 — The collective ownership of all industries 
 which are organized on a national scale and in 
 which competition has virtually ceased to exist. 
 
 4 — The extension of the public domain to in- 
 clude mines, quarries, oil wells, forests and 
 water power. 
 
 5 — The scientific restoration of timber lands 
 and the reclamation of swamp lands. The land 
 so reforested or reclaimed to be permanently 
 retained as a part of the public domain. 
 
 6 — The absolute freedom of press, speech 
 and assemblage. 
 
 Industrial Demands 
 
 7 — The improvement of the industrial con- 
 dition of the workers. 
 
 (a) By shortening the workday in keeping 
 
APPENDIX 249 
 
 with the increased productiveness of ma- 
 chinery. 
 
 (b) By securing to every worker a rest 
 period of not less than a day and a half in each 
 week. 
 
 (c) By securing a more effective inspection 
 of workshops and factories. 
 
 (d) By forbidding the employment of chil- 
 dren under sixteen years of age. 
 
 (e) By forbidding the inter-state trans- 
 portation of the products of child labor, of con- 
 vict labor and of all uninspected factories. 
 
 (f) By abolishing official charity and sub- 
 stituting in its place compulsory insurance 
 against unemployment, illness, accidents, in- 
 validism, old age and death. 
 
 Political Demands 
 
 8 — ^The extension of inheritance taxes, 
 graduated in proportion to the amount of the 
 bequests and to the nearness of kin. 
 
 9 — A graduated income tax. 
 
 10 — Unrestricted and equal suffrage for men 
 and women, and we pledge ourselves to engage 
 in an active campaign in that direction. 
 
 II — The initiative and referendum, propor- 
 tional representation and the right to recall. 
 
 12 — The abolition of the senate. 
 
 13 — The abolition of the power usurped by 
 the supreme court of the United States to pass 
 upon the constitutionality of legislation enacted 
 by congress. National laws to be repealed or 
 
250 APPENDIX 
 
 abrogated only by act of congress or by a refer- 
 endum of the whole people. 
 
 14 — That the constitution be made amend- 
 able by majority vote. 
 
 15 — The enactment of further measures for 
 general education and for the conservation of 
 health. The bureau of education to be made 
 a department. The creation of a department 
 of public health. 
 
 16 — The separation of the present bureau of 
 labor from the department of commerce and 
 labor, and the establishment of a department 
 of labor. 
 
 17 — 'That all judges be elected by the peo- 
 ple for short terms, and that the power to issue 
 injunctions shall be curbed by immediate legis- 
 lation. 
 
 18 — The free administration of justice. 
 
 Such measures of relief as we may be able 
 to force from capitalism are but a preparation 
 of the workers to seize the whole powers of 
 government, in order that they may thereby 
 lay hold of the whole system of industry and 
 thus come to their rightful inheritance. 
 
Ill 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 Following is a list of the books consulted for this 
 presentation of the Socialist's side of his case, together 
 with a few of the volumes referred to for opposing 
 opinions and for information covering current and his- 
 toric economic questions. 
 
 Bax, Ernest Belfort: Essays in Socialism. New and 
 Old. 
 
 Bebel, August: Woman, Past, Present, and Future. 
 
 Bellamy, Edward: Equality. 
 
 Booth, Charles: Life and Labor of the People in 
 London. 
 
 Chapin, Robert Coit: The Standard of Living in New 
 York City. 
 
 Darwin, Charles : The Descent of Man. The Origin of 
 Species. 
 
 Dawson, W. H. : German Socialism and Ferdinand 
 Lassalle. 
 
 Deville, Gabriel : The People's Marx. 
 
 Dorr, Rheta Childe : What Eight Million Women Want. 
 
 Engels, Friedrich : Die Lebenskosten Belgischer Arbei- 
 terfamilien. Feuerbach, The Roots of the Socialist 
 Philosophy. Landmarks of Scientific Socialism. So- 
 cialism, Utopian and Scientific. 
 
 Fabian Essays, The. 
 
 Forman, S. E: Conditions of Living Among the Poor. 
 
 (Bureau of the United States Bureau of Labor, No. 
 
 64, May, 1906). 
 Franklin, Benjamin: Remarks and Facts Relative to 
 
 American Paper Money. 
 
 Ghent, W. J. : Mass and Class. Our Benevolent 
 Feudalism. 
 
 251 
 
252 APPENDIX 
 
 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins : Human Work. The Home. 
 Guthrie, Dr. Wm. B. : Socialism Before the. French 
 
 Revolution. 
 Hardie, Keir: From Serfdom to Socialism. 
 Jaures, Jean : Studies in Socialism. 
 Kautsky, Karl: Ethics and the Materialistic Conception 
 
 of History. Vorlaufer Des Neueren Socialismus. 
 Kropotkin, Prince Peter : Appeal to the Young. Mutual 
 
 Aid a Factor of Evolution. 
 Le Play, Frederic: La Methode Sociale. Les Ouvriers 
 
 Europeens. 
 Lewis, Austin: The Rise of the American Proletariat. 
 Liebknecht, Wilhelm: Biographical Memoirs of Karl 
 
 Marx. 
 
 London, Jack : War of the Classes. 
 
 Marx, Karl : The Communist Manifesto. Das CapitaL 
 
 Revolution and Counter Revolution. 
 Morris, William: News from Nowhere. 
 
 Petty, Sir William. Political Arithmetic. A Treatise 
 on Xaxes and Constitutions. 
 
 Russell, Charles Edward. The Greatest Trust in the 
 World. The Uprising of the Many. 
 
 Schaeffle, A. : Quintessence of Socialism. 
 
 Seligman, E. R. A. : The Economic Interpretation of 
 History. 
 
 Simons, A. M. : The Man Under the Machine. 
 
 Simons, May W. : Women and the Social Problem. 
 
 Sinclair, Upton : Our Bourgeois Literature. 
 
 Smith, Adam : The Wealth of Nations. 
 
 Sparge, John : The Bitter Cry of the Children. Capi- 
 talist and Laborer. The Common Sense of Socialism. 
 The Spiritual Significance of Socialism. Socialism. 
 Underfed School Children. Who They Are and 
 What They Stand for. 
 
 Spencer, Herbert : The Coming Slavery. 
 Steflfens, Lincoln: The Shame of the Cities. 
 Tarbell, Ida M. : History of the Standard Oil Company. 
 Wells, H. G. : This Misery of Boots. A Modern Utopia. 
 New Worlds for Old. 
 
INDEX 
 
 B 
 
 Abbott, Leonard D., 177 
 
 Abolition, 4. 
 
 Amalgamated Association 
 of Iron and Steel Work- 
 ers; injunction against, 
 
 130- 
 
 Amalgamated Society of 
 Railway Servants ; fine 
 imposed on, 130. 
 
 American Colonies ; com- 
 mercial demands of, and 
 the introduction of ma- 
 chinery, 90. 
 
 American Federation of 
 Labor, 5; size of, 116. 
 
 Anarchism; confused with 
 Socialism, 6, 7-8; flag 
 of, 9; philosophic com- 
 pared with militant, 16- 
 20 ; compared with 
 Socialism, 16-20; against 
 Socialism, 213. 
 
 Anarchists; condemned in 
 Chicago, 8. 
 
 Aristotle, on slavery and 
 machines, 72. 
 
 Arkwright's water-power 
 spinning-machine, 89. 
 
 Arts, The; under Social- 
 ism, 205-206. 
 
 Austrian occupation of 
 Italy, 78. 
 
 Average of wages in New 
 York City at present 
 time, 211-212. 
 
 Banking; management of, 
 under Socialism, 194. 
 
 Bax, Ernest Belfort, " Es- 
 says in Socialism," 
 quoted, 62-63, T^-IZ- 
 
 Bebel, August, 175. 
 
 Beef Trust and " reform," 
 210. 
 
 Bellamy, Edward, 175. 
 
 Bibliography, 251-252. 
 
 Blanc, Louis, ^()■, in exile, 
 
 153- 
 
 Blum, Robert; shot in 
 Vienna, 153. 
 
 Bonaparte, Napoleon ; 
 
 quoted, 139. 
 
 Bookstaver, Judge ; in- 
 junction against the In- 
 ternational Typograph- 
 ical Union, 131. 
 
 Britannica, Encyclopaedia, 
 on Socialistic Ethics, 
 206. 
 
 Brown, John ; execution 
 of, 75- 
 
 Bruere, Robert W., 179. 
 
 Buffalo " Express," 131. 
 
 Bureaucracy ; not Social- 
 ism, 6. 
 
 Cabet's "Icaria," ^(). (?) 
 Caesar, Julius ; economic 
 
 253 
 
254 
 
 INDEX 
 
 aspect of his conquest 
 of Gaul, 74. 
 
 "Call, The," 175. 
 
 Carapanella, 76. 
 
 Canals, management of, 
 under Socialism, 193. 
 
 Capital; defined, 30-33; in 
 primitive times, 30 ; 
 always dependent upon 
 Labor, 41 ; concentra- 
 tion of, 90-91, 96-98, 
 101-102, 209 (and farm- 
 ■ ing, 99-100) ; differences 
 with Labor irreconcil- 
 able, 109-111, 124-126; 
 its disregard of law, 
 135-136; combination of, 
 102, 215, 216. 
 
 " Capital, Das," quoted, 
 31-32, 140; writing of, 
 154-158. 
 
 Capitalism ; .based on 
 private ownership, 21 ; 
 beginnings of, 86-88 ; 
 relation to early Trades- 
 guilds, 87-88; invention 
 of machines, 89-90; to 
 competition, 90 ; com- 
 bination, go-91 ; fosters 
 prostitution, 201 ; sum- 
 mary of its progress, 
 215-216; demonstrating 
 practicability of Social- 
 ism, 217. 
 
 Capitalists, organizations 
 of, 112-113, 116, 133, 
 
 136-137- 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas, 64; his 
 theory of history, 65. 
 
 Centralization, 6. 
 
 Chapin, Robert Coit, 
 " Standard of Living 
 Among Working Men's 
 Families in New York 
 City," quoted, 211-212. 
 
 Chicago, riots in, 8. 
 
 Children, condition of, 
 under Socialism, 199. 
 
 Christian ethics and those 
 of Socialism, 206. 
 
 Christian Socialist Fellow- 
 ship, 179-181. 
 
 Church, The, and the 
 slave-traffic, 128. 
 
 Clasped Hands, as Social- 
 ist emblem, 10. 
 
 Class Conflict, 11. (See 
 Class Struggle and War 
 of the Classes, The.) 
 
 Class-Consciousness ; tri- 
 umphs over social dif- 
 ferences, 111-112, 137-. 
 138; creates moral dif- 
 ferences, 112-113. 
 
 Class-distinctions in U. S., 
 11S-117. 
 
 Class-limitations ; now 
 
 final, 117-118. 
 
 Class struggle; an indus- 
 trial struggle, 11-12; de- 
 fined, 104-138, 217-218. 
 (See War of the 
 Classes, The.} 
 
 Class, The ruling; con- 
 trols lawmakers, 128-132. 
 
 Coal Trust, iniquitious, 
 190. 
 
 Coinage, management of, 
 194. 
 
 Collective ownership; not 
 complete under Social- 
 ism, 189; details of, un- 
 der co-operative com- 
 monwealth, 190. 
 
 Columbus, Christopher ; 
 economic aspect of his 
 discovery of America, 
 
 75. 
 Combination; under Cap- 
 italism, go-91 ; inter- 
 
INDEX 
 
 255 
 
 national, 97 ; of Capital, 
 96-98, 102, 215. 
 
 Commodity, a ; defined, 
 32, 216. 
 
 Communism, 7; compared 
 with Socialism, 20-23 ! 
 of primitive man, 78-81, 
 215 ; place in social evo- 
 lution, 79-81 ; opposed to 
 Socialism, 213. 
 
 Communist Alliance, 148- 
 149. 
 
 Communist Manifesto, 
 The ; beginning of 
 modern Socialism, 140 ; 
 import of, 149-151 ; text 
 of, 221-238. 
 
 Competition, decides 
 amount of social-labor 
 in manufacture, 45 ; the 
 second stage of Capital- 
 ism, 90; parent of com- 
 bination, 90-91. 
 
 Concentration of Capital. 
 (See Capital, concentra- 
 tion of.) 
 
 " Conduct of the Under- 
 standing, On the," I. 
 
 Confiscation, 208. 
 
 " Consuming C 1 a s s," 
 
 fallacy of a, 126-127. 
 
 Control of industries ; how 
 to be acquired by co- 
 operative common- 
 wealth, 191-194. 
 
 Co-operation, Evolutionary 
 value of, 76-77. 
 
 Co-operative Common- 
 wealth, The ; outlined, 
 184-206 ; foundation, 184- 
 188; must come slowly, 
 187; acquisition by, 188- 
 193 ; all property not col- 
 lectively owned under, 
 189-190; private owner- 
 
 ship, 190-191 ; business 
 of, 193-194; industrial 
 administrative affairs in, 
 194 ; other administra- 
 tive affairs, 194-196; 
 shorter working-day in, 
 and waste eliminated 
 by, 196 ; trades-unions 
 in, 196; wages of the in- 
 dividual in, 196-198; 
 woman and the home, 
 198-203 ; morals, health 
 and administration of 
 justice, 203-205; educa- 
 tion, art and religion, 
 205-206 ; criticisms of, 
 208-210. 
 
 Cost of living compared 
 with wages in New 
 York City, 211-212. 
 
 Courts, their part in the 
 Classes' struggle, 130- 
 132. 
 
 Credit, management of, 
 under Socialism, 194. 
 
 Cromwellians, 74. 
 
 Crusades, 74. 
 
 D 
 
 " Daily Socialist, The," 
 
 175- 
 
 Darrow, Clarence S., 177. 
 
 Darwin, Charles ; influ- 
 ence of his theories up- 
 on conceptions of his- 
 tory, 65 ; " The Descent 
 of Man " quoted as to 
 value of co-operation, 
 76-77, 114- 
 
 " Das Capital," 31-32, 140 ; 
 privations in the writ- 
 ing of, 154-158. 
 
 Democratic Party, dif- 
 
2S6 
 
 INDEX 
 
 ferences within, is; 
 
 destined to dissipation, 
 
 123 ; failure of, in " re- 
 form," 210. 
 "Descent of Man, The," 
 
 quoted, 76-77. 
 "Deutsche- Franzoesi- 
 
 schen-Jahrbuecher," 145. 
 Deville, Gabriel, quoted, 
 
 32. 
 Direct Legislation, igs, 
 
 204. 
 " Director of Directors, 
 
 The," 209. 
 Direct Representation, ipS- 
 Divorce and Socialism, 
 
 200-203. 
 Drainage, 204. 
 
 " Economic Interpretation 
 of History, The," 71. 
 
 Economic methods of 
 manufacture, 43-45. 
 
 Education under Social- 
 ism, 205. 
 
 Elizabeth, Queen, of Eng- 
 land, economic influ- 
 ences in arts in her 
 reign, 74. 
 
 Engels.Friedrich ; " Feuer- 
 bach, the Roots of 
 Socialistic Philosophy," 
 70-71 ; "Socialism 
 Utopian and Scientific," 
 72; birth and education, 
 146; life in England and 
 friendship with Feargus 
 O'Connor and Robert 
 Owen, 146; meets Marx 
 and works with him, 
 14s, 147; the Com- 
 munist Manifesto, 149- 
 
 151 ; on " Neue Rhei- 
 nische Zeitung," 152-153 ; 
 in the Palatinate, 153. 
 
 " Essays on Socialism," 
 quoted, 62-63. 
 
 Equality, individual ; not 
 presupposed by the So- 
 cialist, 185. 
 
 Exchange Value, defined, 
 35-38, 216. 
 
 Express service, 193. 
 
 " Fabian Essays, The,'' 
 
 175- 
 Family, average size and 
 
 income of, in New York 
 
 City, 211-212. 
 Farming, affected by the 
 
 concentration of wealth, 
 
 99-100; collective, 195. 
 Feudalism ; its place in 
 
 social evolution, 83-86, 
 
 215- 
 
 " Figaro, La," 26. 
 
 " Flood, The Golden," 
 quoted, 37. 
 
 Flower, B. O., 177. 
 
 Forests, ownership of, 193. 
 
 Fourier, Charles, 76. 
 
 Frank, Rev. Edward M., 
 206. 
 
 Franklin, Benjamin; "Re- 
 marks and Facts Rela- 
 tive to American Paper 
 Money," quoted, 41 ; on 
 the four-hour day, 196. 
 
 Freeman, Justice; injunc- 
 tion against Inter- 
 national Cigarmakers' 
 Union, 131. 
 
 Free Trade, 4, 15. 
 
 Free Trade Congress of 
 1846, 147. 
 
INDEX 
 
 257 
 
 "Free Silver," 15. 
 
 French Monarchy, over- 
 throw of, 64. 
 
 Froude, James Anthony, 
 64. 
 
 Garrison, William Lloyd, 
 
 75- 
 Ghent, W. J., "Our 
 
 Benevolent Feudalism," 
 
 quoted, 100. 
 Gibbon, Edward, 63 ; on 
 
 monarchical authority, 
 
 72. 
 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 
 
 177. 
 " Golden Age, The," and 
 
 the slave, 82. 
 Goldman, Emma, 5. 
 Gompers, Samuel, 5. 
 Green, John Richard, 67, 
 
 74- 
 Guthrie, Dr. William B., 
 
 quoted, 17-18 and 22. 
 
 H 
 
 Handicrafts, Rise and Fall 
 of the, 86-89, 215. 
 
 Hanna, Mark, United 
 States Senator, 3, 29. 
 
 Hargreaves's spinning- 
 jenny, 89. 
 
 Haymarket riot trials, 9. 
 
 Haywood, kidnaping of, 
 
 131- 
 Health, care of, under 
 
 Socialism, 204. 
 Hegelianism, Marx's, 144- 
 
 14s. 
 Heine, H., 145-146. 
 Higginson, Thomas Went- 
 
 worth, 177. 
 
 Hillquit, Morris, 179. 
 
 History, old methods of 
 writing, 63-65; as a 
 chronique scandaleuse, 
 64; Carlyle's theory of, 
 65 ; from Socialist's 
 view-point, 65-94, 215 ; 
 materialistic conception 
 of, see Materialistic 
 Conception of History. 
 
 Home, The, under Social- 
 ism, 198-203. 
 
 Hospitals, 194. 
 
 Housing, under Socialism, 
 204. 
 
 Howells, William Dean, 
 175- 
 
 Hoyt, Rev. G. F. Glad- 
 ding, 206. 
 
 Hunter, Robert, 179. 
 
 " Icaria," y6. 
 
 India, commercial de- 
 mands of, and introduc- 
 tion of machinery, 90. 
 
 Individualism in trade, de- 
 cline of, 96-101. 
 
 Individual, The ; under 
 Socialism, 198; relation 
 to society, 184-187. 
 
 Industrial History of 
 Mankind, defined, 79-94. 
 
 Industrial Revolution, 
 
 wrought by machines, 
 89-90. 
 
 Infection, 204. 
 
 Injunction, against Amal- 
 gamated Association of 
 Iron and Steel Workers, 
 130; legislation by, 130- 
 131 ; against Inter- 
 national Typographical 
 Union, 13 1 ; against In- 
 
258 
 
 INDEX 
 
 ternational Cigarmakers' 
 
 Union, 131. 
 " Interests, The,'' purchase 
 
 of lawmakers by, 129. 
 Intercollegiate Socialist 
 
 Society, 176-179. 
 International Cigarmakers' 
 
 Union, i n j unction 
 
 against, 131. 
 International Typograph- 
 ical Union, injunction 
 
 against, 131. 
 International Working 
 
 Men's Alliance, 160. 
 Irvine, Rev. Alexander, 
 
 206. 
 Italy, Austrian occupation 
 
 of, 78; United, 78. 
 
 Jaures, Jean, 175; quoted, 
 201-203. 
 
 Japanese in Manchuria, 74. 
 
 Justice Freeman ; injunc- 
 tion against Inter- 
 national Cigarmakers' 
 Union, 131. 
 
 Justice, Social; its prob- 
 lem, . 187. 
 
 Justice, administration of 
 under Socialism, 204- 
 205. 
 
 K 
 
 Kautsky, Karl, " Vorlaufer 
 des neueren Social- 
 ismus," quoted, 20. 
 
 Kelly, Edmund, 179. 
 
 Kidnaping of Moyer, 
 Haywood and Pettibone, 
 131- 
 
 Kropotkin, Prince Peter, 
 "Mutual Aid a Factor 
 
 of Evolution," quoted, 
 
 62, ^^. 
 
 Labor, defined, 38-51 ; a 
 commodity, 46-48 ; dif- 
 ferences with Capital ir- 
 reconcilable, 109-111, 
 124-126; slave of its 
 tools, 215, 216. 
 
 Land-ownership ; collective 
 co-operative common- 
 wealth, 189, 192-193. 
 
 Lauderdale, Lord, quoted, 
 
 37- 
 Le Fevre, Edwin, quoted, 
 
 37. 
 
 Legislation ; by injunction, 
 130-131 ; direct, 195 and 
 204. 
 
 Liebknecht, Wilhelm, 146, 
 149. 156-158, 159. 
 
 Limitations of Classes, 
 117-118. 
 
 Living, Cost of, compared 
 with wages in New 
 York City, 211-212. 
 
 Locke, John ; " On the 
 Conduct of the Under- 
 standing," quoted, i. 
 
 London, Jack, 175, 177. 
 
 Louis XV., King of 
 France ; economic influ- 
 ences in literature of his 
 reign, 74. 
 
 Luther, Martin; an effect 
 of the Reformation 
 rather than the cause, 
 74- 
 
 M 
 
 McMaster, John Bach, 67, 
 74- 
 
INDEX 
 
 259 
 
 Macaulay, Thomas Bab- 
 bington, 63. 
 
 Machinery, introduction 
 of, causes trade-revolu- 
 tion, 12. 
 
 Mail Service, 193. 
 
 Man, Primitive; a Com- 
 munist, 198. 
 
 Marriage ; under Social- 
 ism no prostitution in 
 marriage, ig8. 
 
 Marx, Frau Jenny von 
 Westphalen ; parentage 
 and marriage, 144; de- 
 scribes death of her 
 daughter, 155-156; dies, 
 159- 
 
 Marx, Karl; quoted, 31- 
 32, 70, 107, 114; 
 biographical sketch of, 
 139-159; parentage and 
 birth, 141-142; educa- 
 tion, 142; takes up jour- 
 nalism, 143 ; edits 
 " Rheinische Zeitung," 
 143 ; marriage, 144 ; his 
 Hegelianism, 144-145 ; 
 first visit to Paris, 145; 
 with Arnold Ruge on 
 " Deutsche Franzoesi- 
 schen-Jahrbuecher," 145 ; 
 meets Heine, Proudhon, 
 Bakunin and Engels, 
 145 ; works on Paris 
 " Vorwaerts " and writes 
 " The Holy Family," 
 146 ; angers Prussian 
 government, is expelled 
 from France and goes 
 to Brussels, 147 ; speech 
 at Free Trade Congress 
 of 1846, 147; writes 
 "The Misery of Phi- 
 losophy," and joins the 
 Communist Alliance, 
 
 148; work on the Com- 
 munist Manifesto, 149- 
 151 ; forced from 
 Belgium, returning to 
 Paris, 151 ; goes to 
 Cologne and edits 
 " Neue Rheinische Zei- 
 tung," 152-153; again in 
 Paris, with Ledru 
 Rollin, 153 ; banished 
 from France, goes to 
 England, 154; life in 
 London and connection 
 with International 
 Working Men's Asso- 
 ciation, 154; at work on 
 "Das Capital," 154-158; 
 writes for New York 
 " Tribune," dies, 159, 
 213. 
 
 Materialistic Conception 
 of History, The, 63, 65- 
 94; not a denial of 
 things spiritual, 69-70 ; 
 not fatalistic determin- 
 ism, 70-71 ; summarized, 
 92-94, 215. 
 
 Memoirists, French, 64. 
 
 Merchants, small swal- 
 lowed by combinations, 
 96-101. 
 
 Mines, ownership of, 193. 
 
 Minor industries, decline 
 of, 98-99. 
 
 Monarchy, overthrow of, 
 in France, 64. 
 
 Money, defined, 35-38, 216. 
 
 Moors in Spain, 74. 
 
 Morals ; part played by, in 
 class differences, 1 12- 
 113; under Socialism, 
 203-204. 
 
 More, Sir Thomas ; 
 "Utopia," 76. 
 
 Morgan, J. Pierpont, 116. 
 
26o 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Mortgaging, control of, 
 
 194. 
 Moyer, kidnaping of, 131. 
 " Mental Aid a Factor in 
 
 Evolution," quoted, 62 
 
 and yT. 
 
 N 
 
 National Association of 
 Manufacturers, 116. 
 
 National Ownership, 5. 
 
 " Nation, The," quoted, 27. 
 
 Natural Monopolies, pri- 
 vate ownership of, un- 
 just, i8g. 
 
 Natural resources, owner- 
 ship of, 193. 
 
 " Neue Rheinische Zei- 
 tung," 152-153. 
 
 "Nihilists," 8. 
 
 O 
 
 Oil-wells, ownership of, 
 
 193- . . 
 
 Oligarchy ; its place in his- 
 tory and social evolu- 
 tion, 83, 215. 
 
 Parcels-post, control of, 
 194. 
 
 Parties, political ; only two 
 in final social struggle, 
 122-124. 
 
 Paternalism, 6, 7; com- 
 pared with Socialism, 
 23-2S ; absent from 
 co-operative common- 
 wealth, 185, 214. 
 
 Patterson, Joseph Medill, 
 quoted, 171-172. 
 
 " People's Marx, The," 
 quoted, 32. 
 
 Pettibone, kidnaping of, 
 
 131- 
 
 Petty, Sir William, "A 
 Treatise on Taxes and 
 Constitution," quoted, 
 40-41. 
 
 Phelan Case, Judge Taft's 
 opinion in, quoted, 104. 
 
 Plots, " The Republic," 76. 
 
 Pompadour, Mme. de, 64. 
 
 Populist Party; failure of, 
 210. 
 
 Poverty; fear of, illumi- 
 nated, 198; cause of 
 most immorality, 203. 
 
 Price, defined, 36-38, 216. 
 
 Primitive Man; trade of, 
 35; a communist, 78-81. 
 
 Production and Distribu- 
 tion, Means of, in 
 Co-operative Common- 
 wealth, 194. 
 
 Profit ; gained by exploita- 
 tion of Labor, 49-51 ; de- 
 fined, 51-58 ; " result of 
 cheap purchase and dear 
 sale," 52-54; "wages of 
 executive ability," 54-55; 
 " employer's reward for 
 risk," 55-57 ; " reward of 
 abstinence," 57-58, 216. 
 
 Prostitution, fostered by 
 Capitalism, 201. 
 
 Protective Tariff, 4. 
 
 Proverbs, The Book of; 
 quoted, 95. 
 
 Q 
 
 " Quintessence of Social- 
 ism, The," 175. 
 
 R 
 
 Railroads, conduct of, 
 193 ; " reform " of, 210. 
 
INDEX 
 
 261 
 
 Recall, Right of, 194, 208. 
 
 Red, why it is the color of 
 Socialism, 9-10. 
 
 Referendum, The, 195. 
 
 " Reform," failures of, 
 210. 
 
 Reformation, The ; marked 
 the finding of the in- 
 dividual, 65 ; economic 
 aspect of, 74. 
 
 Religion, its effect on 
 social evolution, 74 ; 
 under Socialism, 206. 
 
 " Remarks and Facts Rela- 
 tive to American Paper 
 Money," quoted, 41. 
 
 Representation, Direct, 
 
 195- 
 " Republic, The," of Plato, 
 
 76. 
 Republican Party ; dif- 
 ferences within, 15 ; now 
 
 capitalistic, 123. 
 Revolution, American, 64; 
 
 economic view of, 75. 
 Revolution, Industrial, 
 
 wrought by machines, 
 
 88-89. 
 Right of Recall, 208. 
 Rights of Property, 
 
 destruction of, 66. 
 Riots, Haymarket, i, 8. 
 " Rheinische Zeitung," 143. 
 Roads, 194. 
 Rollin, Ledru, 153. 
 Rogers, Thorold, " The 
 
 Economic Interpretation 
 
 of History," 71. 
 Roosevelt, Theodore, S, 
 
 202. 
 Russell, Charles Edward, 
 
 quoted, 164-165-166, 188, 
 
 212-214. 
 Ruge, Arnold, associated 
 
 with Marx, 145. 
 
 Ruling Class, control of 
 lawmakers by, 128-132. 
 
 Russell Sage Foundation, 
 report of, quoted, 211- 
 212. 
 
 St. John, the Divine, 
 Revelation of, quoted, 
 160. 
 
 St. Paul, Second Epistle 
 to the Thessalonians, 
 quoted, 183. 
 
 Saint Simon, 76. 
 
 " Saturday Evening Post," 
 169, 171-172. 
 
 Saxony, revolutionary ma- 
 chine produced in, 89. 
 
 Scheffle, Dr. A., "The 
 Quintessence of Social- 
 ism," 175. 
 
 Schools, Public, under 
 Socialism, 205. 
 
 Seligraan, E. R. S., " The 
 Economic Interpreta- 
 tion of History," 71. 
 
 Sewer-systems, control of, 
 194. 
 
 Shaw, George Bernard, 
 
 175- 
 
 Sinclair, Upton, 177. 
 
 Sixteen to One, Coinage 
 of silver at a ratio of, 4. 
 
 Slavery; its place in social 
 evolution, 81-82, 215. 
 
 Small merchants, disap- 
 pearing, 96-101. 
 
 Small shops, passing of 
 the, loo-ioi. 
 
 Smith, Adam, " The 
 Wealth of Nations," 
 quoted, 28, 38, 39. 
 
 Social Evolution, Social- 
 ism a theory of, 75. 
 
262 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Socialism ; must be met at 
 polls, 2 ; ultimate victory 
 
 , of, predicted, 2-3; why 
 misunderstood, 4-5; still 
 a term of reproach, 5 ; 
 used to describe antago- 
 nistic theories, s ; no 
 destruction of genuine 
 property rights, 6; con- 
 fused with anarchism, 
 6; not sanguinary, 6; 
 not communism, 6; not 
 
 , the rule of a bureau- 
 cracy, nor absolute cen- 
 tralization, 6 ; wrongly 
 charged with belief in 
 mob-rule, 8 ; technical 
 language of, 13 ; differ- 
 ing definitions given by 
 Socialists, 14-16; in- 
 creases application of 
 public power, 17-18; 
 compared with Anar- 
 chism, 16-20; with Com- 
 munism, 20-23 ; with 
 Paternalism, 23-25 ; eco- 
 nomic essentials of, 29- 
 61 ; the same summed 
 uP; S9-61 ; a theory of 
 social evolution, 75 ; 
 forerunners of, 75-76 ; 
 result of Capitalistic 
 combination, 91 ; de- 
 veloping character of, 
 140-141 ; " based on 
 natural inequalities of 
 mankind," 186; presup- 
 poses brotherhood of 
 man, 188; meaning of 
 the term, 210; resume 
 of theory, 213-218; goal 
 of, 219. 
 
 " Socialism," quoted, 38, 
 43-45, 45-46, 186-187. 
 
 Socialist Party, The, 4; 
 
 why formed, 138 ; 
 growth of, in Germany 
 and France, 162-163; in 
 Italy, 163 ; in England 
 and Austria, 163-164 ; 
 in Belgium, Finland, 
 Sweden, Norway, Den- 
 mark, Holland, Japan 
 and Chile, 164; in 
 Argentina, Brazil, Cana- 
 da, Australia, and New 
 Zealand, 165; in United 
 States, 4 and 165-166; 
 organization and 
 methods of, 166-176; ad- 
 vantage of its system 
 over that of elder 
 parties, 167 and 173-174; 
 literature of, 174-175 ; 
 journalism, 175; schools, 
 175-176, 217; platform, 
 239-250. 
 Socialists, defended Chi- 
 cago Anarchists, 8 ; 
 doctrinaire attitude 
 
 of, 5. 
 
 Social-Labor, and Social 
 Labor-^'^alue, 43. 
 
 Social Revolution, 9 : 
 peaceful character of. 
 11-12-13. 
 
 Social-Use- Value, 33. 
 
 Society, Socialist's con- 
 ception of, 184-187. 
 
 Spencer, Herbert, 3; pre- 
 dicts triumph of Social- 
 ism, 26, 29. 
 
 Spargo, John, " Socialism,'' 
 quoted, 38, 43-45, 45-46, 
 47, 179, 186-187. 
 
 " Standard of Living 
 Among Working Men's 
 Families in New York 
 City," quoted, 211-212. 
 
 Standard Oil Company, 
 
INDEX 
 
 263 
 
 " Reform '' methods used 
 upon, 210. 
 
 States Rights, 4. 
 
 Steamboat-lines, control 
 of, 193- 
 
 Stokes, J. G. Phelps, 177- 
 179. 
 
 Street-cleaning, 204. 
 
 Strikes, William H. Taft's 
 opinion upon, 104; a 
 thousand a year in 
 United States, 116-117; 
 hardship of strike to 
 workers even when win- 
 ning, 127-128 
 
 Struggle, Class. (See 
 War of the Classes.) 
 
 Success. of Socialism, 
 prophesied by Herbert 
 Spencer, 26. 
 
 "Sun, The," New York; 
 its fights with the Inter- 
 national Typographical 
 Union, 131. 
 
 Surplus Value, Theory of, 
 defined, 21-22; restated, 
 49-50, 217. 
 
 " Survival of the Fittest, 
 The," 77. 
 
 Taflf Vale Case, The, 130. 
 
 Taft, William Howard ; 
 opinion in Phelan Case, 
 quoted, 104. 
 
 Tariff for Revenue Only, 4. 
 
 Telegraph-Service, 194. 
 
 Telephone-Service, 194. 
 
 Torch as Socialist em- 
 blem, 10. 
 
 Trades-unions, S ; origin 
 of, 87; William H. 
 Taft on, 104; necessi- 
 tated by Capitalistic 
 
 combination, 109 and 
 
 III. 
 Traubel, Horace, 175. 
 Tramways, control of, 193. 
 " Treatise on Taxes and 
 
 Constitutions, A," 
 
 quoted, 40, 41. 
 " Tribune," The, New 
 
 York; Marx's work for, 
 
 iSS; quoted, 181-182. 
 Triggs, Oscar Lovell, 177. 
 
 U 
 
 United States, class dis- 
 tinctions in, 115-117. 
 
 Use- Values, 32 ; defined, 
 33-34, 216. 
 
 "Utopia," 76. 
 
 Utopian Socialism, 75-76. 
 
 V 
 
 Value; defined, 36-38; the 
 real law of, 43-4S, 216. 
 
 Vote, Socialist; in Ger- 
 many and France, 162; 
 in Italy, 163 ; in Eng- 
 land and Austria, 163- 
 164; in Belgium, Fin- 
 land, Sweden, Norway, 
 Denmark, Holland, Ja- 
 pan and Chile, 164; in 
 Argentine, Brazil, Cana- 
 da, Australia and New 
 Zealand, 165; in the 
 United States, 4, 165- 
 166. 
 
 " Vorwaerts," 146. 
 
 " Vorlaufer des neueren 
 Socialismus," quoted, 20. 
 
 W 
 Wage-Slavery, origin of, 
 88. 
 
264 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Wages, rival ideas of, log- 
 in; in the Co-operative 
 Commonwealth, 197 ; 
 present average of, in 
 New York City, 211-212. 
 
 Walling, William English, 
 177. 
 
 War of the Classes, The, 
 9; defined, 104-138; 
 Capitalistic arguments 
 against socialistic con- 
 ception of, 105-107, 120- 
 121 ; in former times, 
 108-109; not a Socialis- 
 tic theory, but an his- 
 toric fact, 107-109, 114- 
 irS; necessary because 
 of class-limitations, 117- 
 118; not an appeal to 
 mob spirit, 118; does not 
 make for selfishness, 
 1 18- 1 19; not based on 
 personal animosity, 119- 
 120; to be ended by 
 organization, 121-124; 
 political parties in, 122- 
 124; not to be ended by 
 benevolence, 124-126; 
 relation to " the Con- 
 sumer," 126-128; par- 
 
 ^ tiality of the law in, 128- 
 132 ; tactical measures, 
 132-134; ultimate tri- 
 
 umph of Labor in, 134- 
 138. 
 
 War, to be ended by 
 Socialism, 188, 203. 
 
 Water-power and water- 
 ways, control of, 193. 
 
 Wayland's Monthly, 
 quoted, 192. 
 
 Wealth, 216 ; concentra- 
 tion of, go-91, 96-98; 
 102, 209 ; control of, cen- 
 tering among the few, 
 97 and 102. 
 
 Wealth-making, in primi- 
 tive times, 78. 
 
 " Wealth of Nations. 
 The," quoted, 38, 39. 
 
 Webb, Sidney, 175. 
 
 Wells, H. G., 175. 
 
 Willard, Frances E., on 
 Socialism, 180- 181. 
 
 Woman under Socialism, 
 198-203. 
 
 Wood, Eugene, 175. 
 
 Work, guaranteed to all 
 in Co-operative Com- 
 monwealth, 196-197. 
 
 World-Republic, 218. 
 
 Zola, Emile, 173.