He
never made his address, for the audience was unwilling to hear anything
about "human nature." No Socialists in general are willing to do so, for
human nature, with the mental and spiritual sides of life, is just the
element with which their fallacious creed cannot deal, and they know it.
But the human element must enter into business and trade in the problems
of direction, management, even in the form of competition itself, and
cannot possibly be eradicated.

It is amusing to note that these same Socialists are busily occupied
with pointing out what they consider to be the failures of government,
as well as of "business and capitalism." Yet they do not realize that
they are thus condemning their own system, for if the governments of the
world have failed to do the work at present laid upon them, how can they
ever undertake the gigantic additional political and capitalistic
burden that Socialism would impose? Thomas Jefferson, the patron saint
of the party that President Wilson now leads, always expressed a fear of
"too much government." It would appear that the present Administration
and the Democratic members of Congress have wandered far from their old
beliefs, and if recent legislation is the result of it, their
Socialistic experiments have not been much of a success.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: _The English-Speaking Peoples_, p. 203.]

SOCIALISM--IS IT AMERICAN?

I

ITS CONFLICT WITH THE IDEA OF EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY

One of the main difficulties in discussing Socialism is to find a
working definition; for this political or social movement is based upon
a system of a priori reasoning which often is vague and lacking in
deductions from practical experience. Socialism also is unreal in its
assumptions and impractical in its conclusions, so that a person finds
it almost impossible to give a definition that will include within its
scope all the Socialistic vagaries and explain all the suppositions
based upon nonexistent facts. Bearing this difficulty in mind, perhaps
the following will serve as a working definition for the purposes of
the present discussion. Socialism is the collective ownership (exerted
through the government, or society politically organized) of the means
of production and distribution of all forms of wealth. This means wealth
not alone in mere terms of money but in the economic sense of everything
that is of use for the support or enjoyment of mankind. Of course
"production and d