aged, supported,
and financed by the money powers of the State, and in turn they
have conducted the legislatures, courts, and executive offices of
the State as accessories to the business interests of those
classes.

"These vices of our government are not accidental, but are deeply
and firmly rooted in our industrial system. To maintain its
supremacy in this conflict the dominating class _must_ strive to
control our government and politics, and must influence and corrupt
our public officials.

"The two old parties _as well as the so-called reform parties of
the middle classes_, which spring up in New York politics from time
to time, all stand for the continuance of that system, hence they
are bound to perpetuate and to aggravate its inevitable evils...."

The New York Party had immediately before it the example of Mr. Hearst,
who has gone as far as the radicals of the old parties in Wisconsin, or
Kansas, Oklahoma, California, or Oregon in verbally indorsing radical
reform measures, and also of Mr. Roosevelt, who occasionally has gone
almost as far. Day after day the Hearst papers had sent out to their
millions of readers editorials which contain every element of Socialism
except its essence, the class struggle. The New York Party, like many in
other Socialist organizations, found itself _compelled by circumstances
to take a revolutionary stand_.

For when opportunistic reformers opposed to the Socialist movement go as
far as the Hearst papers in indorsing "State Socialist" reforms, what
hope would there be for Socialists to gain the public ear if they went
scarcely farther, either as regards the practical measures they propose
or the phrases they employ? If the "reformist" Socialists answer that
their _ultimate aim_ is to go farther, may they not be asked what
difference this makes in present-day affairs? And if they answer that
certain reforms must be forced through by Socialist threats, political
or revolutionary, will they not be told, first that it can be shown that
the whole "State Socialistic" reform program, if costly to many
individual capitalists, promises to prove _ultimately profitable_ to
the capitalist class, and second, that it is being carried out where
there is no present menace either of a Socialist revolution or even of a
more or less Socialistic political majority.

But the position of the politically ambitious among so-called "or