down. With the great mass of the producers receiving bare subsistence
wages the impossibility of disposing of the almost miraculously
stupendous product of modern machines and processes is mathematically
demonstrable. The former paradox of the Socialist agitator, that the
Utopian is the man who believes in the possibility of the continuance of
the present system, has become a platitude. Nor can many be found to
dispute the statement that the centralization of industry in the United
States has reached a point where Socialism is economically entirely
practicable. The doubt of the sceptics is: Will the workers create, in
the language of economics, an effective demand for Socialism? Two
eminent Utopians have voiced this doubt in the recent past. Their names
are George D. Herron and Daniel DeLeon. Both alike forget that the
desires, ideals, and motives of the proletariat cannot but be in harmony
with their economic environment, and I do not think that either of them
would deny that, as we near the downfall of Capitalism, the economic
environment will more and more imperatively drive men to Socialism as
the only avenue of escape from chaos and pessimism. On this point, of
the motives to action of the individual being formed by economic
conditions, Marx wrote in "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte":
"On the various forms of property, on the conditions of social
existence, there rises an entire superstructure of various and
peculiarly formed sensations, illusions, methods of thought and views of
life. The whole class fashions and moulds them from out of their
material foundations and their corresponding social relations. The
single individual, in whom they converge through tradition and
education, is apt to imagine that they constitute the real determining
causes and the point of departure of his action." (Prof. Seligman's
translation.)

The man who has thoroughly assimilated the doctrine of historical
materialism cannot for a moment doubt the inevitability of Socialism.
The utopianism which evinces itself in this doubt may be depended upon
to betray itself elsewhere in the views of the doubters. We find that
this is signally true in the case of the two illustrious utopian
sceptics I have mentioned. The Natural Rights platform that Professor
Herron wrote and the Socialist Party adopted in 1904 is only less
utopian than Daniel DeLeon's curiously childish conceit that in the
highly factitious, "wheel of fortune" form of o