clipped, and
larger profits than ever were extracted from the toilers.
Coupon-clipping and profit-extracting would continue to the end of time.
These were functions divine in origin and held by divine right. The
newspapers, the preachers, and the college presidents said so, and what
they say, of course, is so--to the bourgeois mind.

Then came the presidential election of 1904. Like a bolt out of a clear
sky was the socialist vote of 435,000,--an increase of nearly 400 per
cent in four years, the largest third-party vote, with one exception,
since the Civil War. Socialism had shown that it was a very live and
growing revolutionary force, and all its old menace revived. I am afraid
that neither it nor I are any longer respectable. The capitalist press
of the country confirms me in my opinion, and herewith I give a few
post-election utterances of the capitalist press:--

"The Democratic party of the constitution is dead. The
Social-Democratic party of continental Europe, preaching discontent
and class hatred, assailing law, property, and personal rights, and
insinuating confiscation and plunder, is here."--Chicago Chronicle.

"That over forty thousand votes should have been cast in this city to
make such a person as Eugene V. Debs the President of the United
States is about the worst kind of advertising that Chicago could
receive."--Chicago Inter-Ocean.

"We cannot blink the fact that socialism is making rapid growth in
this country, where, of all others, there would seem to be less
inspiration for it."--Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

"Upon the hands of the Republican party an awful responsibility was
placed last Tuesday. . . It knows that reforms--great, far-sweeping
reforms--are necessary, and it has the power to make them. God help
our civilization if it does not! . . . It must repress the trusts or
stand before the world responsible for our system of government being
changed into a social republic. The arbitrary cutting down of wages
must cease, or socialism will seize another lever to lift itself into
power."--The Chicago New World.

"Scarcely any phase of the election is more sinisterly interesting
than the increase in the socialist vote. Before election we said
that we could not afford to give aid and comfort to the socialists in
any manner. . . It (socialism) must be fought in all its phases, in
its every manife