ule?" and that the radicals
may be forced entirely over to the Socialist position, as the
Republicans were forced to the position of the Abolitionists when
Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Mr. Ray Stannard Baker
notes also that capital is continually the aggressor, as were the
slaveholders, and that the conflict is likely to grow more and more
acute, since "no one imagines that these powerful men of money will give
up their advantage lightly" any more than the old slaveholders did.

Another "insurgent" publicist (Mr. William Allen White) says that the
aim of radicalism in the United States is "the regulation and control of
capital" and that the American people have made up their minds that
"capital, the product of the many, is to be operated fundamentally for
the benefit of the many." It is one of those upheavals, he believes,
which come along once in a century or so, dethrone privilege, organize
the world along different lines, take the persons "at the apex of the
human pyramid" from their high seats and "iron out the pyramid into a
plane."[35]

If the aim of the "progressives" is the overthrow of "the rule of
property" as Mr. Baker claims--if, in the words of Mr. White again,
"America is joining the world movement towards equal opportunity for all
men in our modern civilization," then indeed the greatest political and
economic struggle of history, the final conflict between capitalism and
Socialism, is at hand.

But when we ask along what lines this great war for a better society is
to be waged, and by what methods, we are told that the parties to the
conflict are separated, not by practical economic interests, but by
"ideas" and "ideals," and that the chief means by which this social
revolution is to be accomplished are direct legislation and the recall
and their use to extend government ownership or control so as gradually
to close one door after another upon the operations of capital until its
power for harm is annihilated, _i.e._ democracy and collectivism. In
other words, the militant phrases used by Socialists in earnest are
adopted by radicals as convenient and popular battle cries in their
campaign for "State Socialism," as to banking, railroads, mines, and a
few industrial "trusts," but without the slightest attempt either to end
the "rule of property" or to secure "equal opportunity" for any but
farmers and small business men. They do nothing, moreover, to bring
about the new political and cl