ary sufferings is dependent
upon such an equitable sharing of the labor involved in the making and
operating of the machines of production and distribution, and upon such
an equitable sharing of the products as shall issue in a classless
mankind by doing away, through a revolution, with the class which lives
by owning the means and machines of production and distribution.

It is this advocacy of classless levelism which constitutes the
theoretical core of revolutionary socialism. Those who oppose this
socialism proceed upon the assumption of the permanency of existing
religious and political institutions, the most ruinous of all heresies.

What this heresy is and the fatal policy to which it gives rise has its
classic expression, so far as religion is concerned, in the
exhortation--"earnestly contend for the faith once for all delivered to
the saints"--and, so far as politics is concerned, in the
representation--"the laws of the Medes and Persians which altereth not."

There is no such faith in religion, and cannot be, for as a creed
becomes stereotyped it loses the religious character and degenerates
into superstition.

There are no such laws in politics, and cannot be, for as a law becomes
stereotyped it loses the political character and degenerates into
tyranny.

Religion, which is the ideal half, and politics, which is the practical
half, of the same reality, human socialism, are like all else in the
universe, constantly changing, and necessarily so, because life and
progress are dependent upon change.

Orthodoxy in religion and politics is the blight of the ages, because of
its assumption that the great institutions, the family, state and church
with their customs, laws and doctrines, as they exist for the time
being, constitute the foundation of society, without which it could not
exist; that these institutions are almost if not altogether what they
should be, and that, therefore, the welfare of society, if not indeed
its existence, is dependent upon their continuance with but little if
any change.

But the foundation of society always has been a system for the
production and distribution of the necessities of life, and hence social
institutions, customs, laws and creeds are what they are at any time
because an economic system is what it is.

If we compare an economic system for the production of the primary
necessities of life (foods, clothes and houses) to a king or bishop (we
may well do so, for in al