ying by thousands and think angry gods are punishing them. All they
can hope to do is to appease the gods by gifts or by mutilating their
own poor bodies. That is human nature, my friend. But a great
scientist like Dr. Koch, of Berlin, goes into the African centres of
pestilence and death, seeks the germ of the disease, drains swamps,
purifies water, isolates the infected cases and proves himself more
powerful than the poor natives' gods. And that is human nature.
Outside the gates of the Chicago stockyards, I have seen crowds of men
fighting for work as hungry dogs fight over a bone. That was human
nature. I have seen a man run down in the streets and at once there
was a crowd ready to lift him up and to do anything for him that they
could. It was the very opposite spirit to that shown by the brutish,
snarling, cursing, fighting men at the stockyards, but it was just as
much human nature.

The great law of human development, that which expresses itself in
what is so vaguely termed human nature, is that man is a creature of
his environment, that self-preservation is a fundamental instinct in
human beings. Socialism is not an idealistic attempt to substitute
some other law of life for that of self-preservation. On the contrary,
it rests entirely upon that instinct of self-preservation. Here are
two classes opposed to each other in modern society. One class is
small but exceedingly powerful, so that, despite its disadvantage in
size, it is the ruling class, controlling the larger class and
exploiting it. When we ask ourselves how that is possible, how it
happens that the smaller class rules the larger, we soon find that the
members of the smaller class have become conscious of their interests
and the fact that these can be best promoted through organization and
association. Thus conscious of their class interests, and acting
together by a class instinct, they have been able to rule the world.
But the workers, the class that is much stronger numerically, have
been slower to recognize their class interests. Inevitably, however,
they are developing a similar class sense, or instinct. Uniting in the
economic struggle at first, and then, in the political struggle in
order that they may further their economic interests through the
channels of government, it is easy to see that only one outcome of
the struggle is possible. By sheer force of numbers, the workers must
win, Jonathan.

The Socialist movement, then, is not somethin