ds or
power of the workers.

Mr. Berger is reported to have said a few days after this speech: "The
idea will in five years have been incorporated into law. Both of the old
parties within that time will have incorporated the theory into their
platforms. Both the old parties to-day are approaching Socialistic
ideas, and appropriating our ideas to save themselves from the coming
overthrow."[163] The idea of governmental old-age pensions, on the
contrary, has always been popular in certain anti-Socialist circles and
is entirely in accord with any intelligent system of purely capitalistic
collectivism. Its common adoption by progressive capitalists would seem
to indicate that they consider it as being either directly or indirectly
conducive to their own interests. It is unnecessary to assume that they
adopt it from fear of Socialism. Few if any capitalists consider the
overthrow of capitalism as imminent, or feel that Socialism is likely
for many years to furnish them with a really acute political problem. A
combination of Republicans and Democrats, for example, with a full vote,
would easily overwhelm Mr. Berger, the sole Socialist Congressman in
his own Congressional district. If present political successes continue,
it will still take years for Socialism to send a score of
representatives to Congress, and when it does do so, they will be as
impotent as ever to overthrow the capitalist order.

For any independent representative without political power or
responsibility to propose radical reforms in advance of the larger
parties is a very simple matter. Statesmen with actual power cannot
afford to take up such reforms until the time is _politically_ ripe for
their practical consideration. When such a measure is passed, for the
individual or group that first proposed it to claim the credit for the
change would be absurd. These reforms, when conditions have suitably
evolved, become the order of the day, and are urged by all or nearly all
the forces of the time. The radical British old-age pension bill, it
will be remembered, was passed almost unanimously, although in the
Parliament that passed it there were only about 40 Socialist or
semi-Socialist representatives out of a total of 670 members.

What, then, could be more fatuous than such a view as the following,
expressed recently by a well-known Socialist:--

"Do you not think that the whole country should be apprised that this
(Berger's Old-age Pension bill) is a Soci