ill
scarcely be turned to favor capitalism by their investments, which bring
in small profit and allow them nothing to say in the management of
industry, but neither will the losses they sometimes suffer from this
source be sufficient in themselves to convert them into allies of the
working class.

As in the case of the farmers and small shopkeepers, everything here
depends upon the economic and political program which the working class
develops and offers in competition with the "State Socialism" of the
capitalists. If it were true that the ownership of the smallest amount
of property brings it about that Socialism is no longer desired, not a
small minority of the population will be found aligned with the
capitalists, but all the four million owners of farms, and the other
millions with a thousand dollars or so invested in a building and loan
association, an insurance policy or a savings bank deposit, a total
numbering almost half of the occupied population. A bare majority, it is
true, might still be without any stake in the community even of this
modest character. But neither in the United States nor elsewhere is
there any hope that a majority of the absolutely propertyless, even if
it becomes a large one, will become sufficiently large within a
generation, or perhaps even within a century, to enable it to overthrow
the capitalists, unless it draws over to its side certain elements at
least, of the middle classes, who, though weaker in some respects are
better educated, better placed, and politically stronger than itself.
The revolutionary spokesmen of the international Socialist movement now
recognize this as clearly as do the most conservative observers.

The outcome of the great social struggle depends on the relative success
of employers and employed in gaining the support of those classes which,
either on account of their ownership of some slight property, or because
they receive salaries or fees sufficiently large, must be placed in the
middle class, but who cannot be classified _primarily_ as small
capitalists That this is the crux of the situation is recognized on all
sides. Mr. Winston Churchill, for instance, demands that everything be
done to strengthen and increase numerically this middle class, composed
of millions of persons whom he claims "would certainly lose by anything
like a general overturn, and ... are everywhere the strongest and the
best organized millions," and his "State Socialism" is direct