of the _New York Daily Call_:--

"The Socialist Legislator finds his task a comparatively easy and
simple one. He proposes or supports every measure of advantage to
the working class in particular and to the great majority of the
people in general, barring such as are of a reactionary character.
But the Socialist executive and the Socialist judge find themselves
in no such simple situation. Their activities are circumscribed by
superior and hostile powers, and by written constitutions adopted
at the dictation of the capitalist class. How to harmonize their
activities with the just demands of the working class for the
immediate betterment of its conditions, as well as with the
Socialist program which has for its goal the ultimate overthrow of
the capitalist social order, and yet not come into such conflict
with the superior and hostile powers as would result in their own
removal from office--this question is bound to assume a gravity not
yet perhaps dreamed of by the majority of American Socialists.

"And yet even now, while our political power is still small, the
charge of opportunism, or the neglect of principle in pursuit of
some practical advantage, is continually being raised, sometimes
justly, sometimes unjustly."

The following from the _New York Evening Post_, illustrates both the
political and the economic difficulty of enacting Socialistic or even
radical measures in municipalities. It is taken from a special article
on the situation in Schenectady, where a Socialist, Dr. George R. Lunn
had just been elected mayor:--

"Schenectady is trying hard to take its dose of Socialism
philosophically. Its most staid and respectable citizens, who have
been staid and respectable Republicans and Democrats all their
life, console themselves with the thought that, after all, Old Dorp
is Old Dorp--Old Dorp being the affectionate way of referring to
Schenectady--and that her best citizens are still her best
citizens, and that Rev. George R. Lunn and all his Socialist crew
can't do a great amount of harm in two years to a city that
possesses such an ironclad charter as that with which Horace White,
when he was a Senator, endowed every city of the second class in
the Empire State. The conservative element in town back that
charter against all the reforms that the minis