realization of
constructive needs in every man's mind," and if every man is more or
less a Socialist, then there is certainly no need for that antagonism to
employers and property owners of which Mr. Wells complains.

Mr. Wells himself gives the true Socialist standpoint when he goes on to
write that political parties must be held together "by interests and
habits, not ideas." "Every party," he continues, "stands essentially for
the interests and mental usages of some definite class or group of
classes in the existing community.... No class will abolish itself,
materially alter its way or life, or drastically reconstruct itself,
albeit no class is indisposed to cooeperate in the unlimited
socialization of any other class. In that capacity of aggression upon
the other classes lies the essential driving force of modern
affairs."[8]

The habits and interests of a large and growing part of the population
in every modern country are developing a capacity for effective
aggression against the class which controls industry and government. As
this class will not socialize or abolish itself, the rest of the people,
Socialists predict, will undertake the task. And the abolition of
capitalism, they believe, will be a social revolution the like of which
mankind has hitherto neither known nor been able to imagine.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] John Spargo, "Karl Marx," pp. 312, 331.

[2] John Spargo, _op. cit._, p. 116.

[3] John Spargo, _op. cit._, p. 73.

[4] The _Independent_ (New York), commenting on the Socialist victory in
the Milwaukee municipal elections of April, 1910.

[5] "Recent Socialist Literature," by John Graham Brooks, _Atlantic
Monthly_, 1910. Page 283.

[6] _Collier's Weekly_, July 30, 1910.

[7] H. G. Wells, "Socialism and the Family."

[8] H. G. Wells, "The New Macchiavelli."

SOCIALISM AS IT IS

PART I

"STATE SOCIALISM" AND AFTER

CHAPTER I

THE CAPITALIST REFORM PROGRAM

Only that statesman, writer, or sociologist has the hearing of the
public to-day who can bind all his proposed reforms together into some
large and far-sighted plan.

Mr. Roosevelt, in this new spirit, has spoken of the "social
reorganization of the United States," while an article in one of the
first numbers of _La Follette's Weekly_ protested against any program of
reform "which fails to deal with society as a whole, which proposes to
remedy certain abuses but admits its incapacity to reach and remove the
roots o