e strategical positions are
held by the small capitalists. They outnumber the large capitalists and
their retainers ten to one, and they hold _the political balance of
power_ between these and the propertyless classes. The control of
industry and the control of government being in the long run one and the
same, the only course left to the large capitalists is to compromise
with the small, and the common organization of centralized and
decentralized capital with the aid and protection of government is
assured.

The fact that, for the masses of mankind, capitalism is the enemy, and
not "Big Business," is then obscured by the warfare of the small
capitalists against the large. Perhaps nowhere in the world and at no
time in history has this conflict taken on a more definite or acute form
than it has recently in this country. So intense is the campaign of the
smaller interests, and it is being fought along such broad lines that it
often seems to be directed against capitalism itself. The masses of the
people, even of the working classes, in America and Great Britain have
yet no conception of the real war against capitalism, as carried on by
the Socialists of Continental Europe, and it seems to them that this new
small capitalist radicalism amounts practically to the same thing.

The "Insurgents," it is true, differ fundamentally from the Populists of
ten and twenty years ago, in so far they understand fully that in many
fields competition cannot be restored, that the large corporations
cannot be dissolved into small ones and must be regulated or owned by
the government, because they have deserted the Jeffersonian maxim that
"that government is best that governs least."

"With the growing complexity of our social and business relations," says
_La Follette's Weekly_, "a great extension of governmental functions has
been necessary. The authority of State and nation reaches out in
numberless and hitherto unknown forms affecting and regulating our daily
lives, our occupations, our earning power, and our cost of living. The
need for this intervention, for collective action by the people through
their duly constituted government, to preserve and promote their own
welfare, is a need that is growing more and more important and
imperative to meet the rapidly growing power of commerce, industry and
finance, centralized and organized in the hands of a few men."

This is nothing more nor less than the creed of capitalist collectivism.