ated Sidney,
Dec. 12, 1909.

[79] The data upon which this chapter is based is also obtained chiefly
from Mr. Victor Clark's "Labour Movement in Australasia," and "State
Socialism in New Zealand," by Stewart and Le Rossignol.

[80] Victor S. Clark, _op. cit._

[81] Stewart and Rossignol, _op. cit._

[82] The _Atlantic Monthly_, July, 1911.

CHAPTER VII

"EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY"

Many reformers admit that no reforms can bring us towards democracy as
long as class rule continues. Henry George, for example, recognizes that
his great land reform, the government appropriation of rent for public
purposes, is useless when the government itself is monopolized, "when
political power passes into the hands of a class, and the rest of the
community become merely tenants."[83] In precisely the same way every
great "State Socialist" reform must fail to bring us a single step
towards real democracy, as long as classes persist.

That strongly marked social classes do exist even in the United States
is now admitted by Dr. Lyman Abbott, Andrew Carnegie, and by innumerable
other, by no means Socialistic, observers.

"The average wage earner," says John Mitchell, "has made up his mind
that he must remain a wage earner. He has given up the hope of a kingdom
to come where he will himself be a capitalist."[84] This feeling is
almost universally shared by manual wage earners, and very widely also
by salaried brain workers. Large prizes still exist, and their influence
is still considerable over the minds of young men. But, as was pointed
out recently in an editorial of the _Saturday Evening Post_, they are
"just out of reach," and the instances in which they actually
materialize are "so relatively few as to be negligible." Even if these
prizes were a hundred fold more numerous than they are, the children of
the wage earners would still not have a tithe of the opportunity of the
children of the well-to-do.

To-day in the country opportunities are no better than in the towns. The
universal outcry for more farm labor can only mean that such laborers
are becoming relatively fewer because they are giving up the hope that
formerly kept them in the country, namely, that of becoming farm owners.
Already Mr. George K. Holmes of the United States Bureau of Statistics
estimates that in the chief agricultural section of the country, the
North Central States, a man must be rich before he can become a farmer,
and so rapidly is this con