of creation had
designed them to be mortal enemies.

* * * * *

Typical capitalists are barren of the social spirit. The very nature of
the catch-as-catch-can encounter in which they are engaged makes them
wary and suspicious, if not downright hateful of each other, and the
latent good that is in them dies for the want of incentive to express
itself.

The other day I saw two such capitalists shake hands. It was pitiable.
Their hearts had no part in the purely perfunctory ceremony. They
happened to meet and could not avoid each other. And so they
mechanically touched each other's reluctant hands, standing at right
angles to each other for a moment--not face to face--and then passing
on without either looking the other in the eyes.

This cold and heartless ceremony typified the relation begotten of
capitalist individualism in which men's interests are competitive and
antagonistic and in which each instinctively looks out for himself and
is on the alert to take every possible advantage of his fellow-man.

The result of this system is inevitably a race of Ishmaelites.

How differently two Socialist comrades shake hands! Their hearts are in
their palms and the joy of greeting is in their eyes. They have the
social spirit. Their interests are mutual and their aspirations kindred.
If one happens to be strong and the other weak, the stronger shares the
weakness and the weaker shares the strength of his comrade. The base
thought of taking a mean advantage, one of the other, does not darken
their minds or harden their hearts. They are joined together in the
humanizing bonds of fellowship. They multiply each other and they
rejoice in their comradely kinship. The best there is in each, and not
the worst, as in the contact of individualism, is appealed to and
brought forth for the benefit of both.

What an elevating, enlarging and satisfying relation!

And this is the "dead level" of mediocrity and servitude to which we are
to sink when this relation becomes universal among men as it will in the
International Socialist Republic!

So at least we are told by those who in the present system have
acquired the instincts and impulses of animals of prey in the
development of their imagined superiority by draining the veins and
wrecking the lives of their vanquished competitors, but we are not
impressed by the virtues of the system of which they stand as the
shining examples.

* *