station."--San Francisco Argonaut.

And far be it from me to deny that socialism is a menace. It is its
purpose to wipe out, root and branch, all capitalistic institutions of
present-day society. It is distinctly revolutionary, and in scope and
depth is vastly more tremendous than any revolution that has ever
occurred in the history of the world. It presents a new spectacle to the
astonished world,--that of an _organized_, _international_,
_revolutionary movement_. In the bourgeois mind a class struggle is a
terrible and hateful thing, and yet that is precisely what socialism
is,--a world-wide class struggle between the propertyless workers and the
propertied masters of workers. It is the prime preachment of socialism
that the struggle is a class struggle. The working class, in the process
of social evolution, (in the very nature of things), is bound to revolt
from the sway of the capitalist class and to overthrow the capitalist
class. This is the menace of socialism, and in affirming it and in
tallying myself an adherent of it, I accept my own consequent
unrespectability.

As yet, to the average bourgeois mind, socialism is merely a menace,
vague and formless. The average member of the capitalist class, when he
discusses socialism, is condemned an ignoramus out of his own mouth. He
does not know the literature of socialism, its philosophy, nor its
politics. He wags his head sagely and rattles the dry bones of dead and
buried ideas. His lips mumble mouldy phrases, such as, "Men are not born
equal and never can be;" "It is Utopian and impossible;" "Abstinence
should be rewarded;" "Man will first have to be born again;" "Cooperative
colonies have always failed;" and "What if we do divide up? in ten years
there would be rich and poor men such as there are today."

It surely is time that the capitalists knew something about this
socialism that they feel menaces them. And it is the hope of the writer
that the socialistic studies in this volume may in some slight degree
enlighten a few capitalistic minds. The capitalist must learn, first and
for always, that socialism is based, not upon the equality, but upon the
inequality, of men. Next, he must learn that no new birth into spiritual
purity is necessary before socialism becomes possible. He must learn
that socialism deals with what is, not with what ought to be; and that
the material with which it deals is the "clay of the common road," the
warm human, falli