revolution." I remember that when I
joined the Socialist movement, many years ago, the Social Revolution was
a very real event, inevitable and nigh at hand, to most of us. The more
enthusiastic of us dreamed of it; we sang songs in the spirit of the
_Chansons Revolutionaires_, one of which, as I recall, told plainly
enough what we would do--

"When the Revolution comes."

Some comrades actually wanted to have military drill at our business
meetings, merely that we might be ready for the Revolution, which might
occur any Monday morning or Friday afternoon. If this seems strange and
comic as I relate it to-day, please remember that we were very few and
very young, and, therefore, very sure that we were to redeem the world.
We lived in a state of revolutionary ecstasy. Some of us, I think, must
have gone regularly to sleep in the mental state of Tennyson's May
Queen, with words equivalent to her childish admonition--

"If you're waking call me early,"

so fearful were we that the Revolution might start without us!

There can be no harm in these confessions to-day, for we have grown far
enough beyond that period to laugh at it in retrospect. True, there is
still a good deal of talk about the Social Revolution, and there may be
a few Socialists here and there who use the term in the sense I have
described; who believe that capitalism will come to a great crisis, that
there will be a rising of millions in wrath, a night of fury and agony,
and then the sunrise of Brotherhood above the blood-stained valley and
the corpse-strewn plain. But most of us, when we use the old term, by
sheer force of habit, or as an inherited tradition, think of the Social
Revolution in no such spirit. We think only of the change that must
come over society, transferring the control of its life from the few to
the many, the change that is now going on all around us. When the time
comes that men and women speak of the state in which they live as
Socialism, and look back upon the life we live to-day with wonder and
pity, they will speak of the period of revolution as including this very
year, and, possibly, all the years included in the lives of the youngest
persons present. At all events, no considerable body of Socialists
anywhere in the world to-day, and no Socialist whose words have any
influence in the movement, believe that there will be a sudden, violent
change from capitalism to Socialism.

If it seemed necessary, abunda