ch phrases, and has essentially
the same foundation of education. Moreover the publicity of our life
in this era of print too easily teaches the workingman that his master
may be neither better nor wiser than he and his comrades. And finally,
the political and economic discussions of the last half century have
made it perfectly clear to him that the removing of the material
misery lies in the realm of practical possibility, and that even
without bombs a new economic order may be created almost as easily as
a new tariff law or an income tax or an equal suffrage. Hence it is
not surprising that all these motives combined turn the imagination of
millions to the new panaceas.

But if low motives are mixed with high ones in the mind of the
champions of socialism, they certainly have never stopped assuring us
that it is worse with their opponents. Marx himself declared
passionately that greed was the deepest spring, that "the most violent
and malignant passions of the human breast, the furies of private
interest" are whipping men into the battle against socialism. However
that may be, the discussions in the clubroom and in the political hall
perhaps oftener suggest a less malignant motive, a persistent
carelessness, which keep the friends of the capitalistic order from
making the effort really to find out at what the socialists are
aiming. The largest part of the private and public accusations of
socialism starts from the conviction that socialism means that all men
must have equal property, and in consideration of the fact that no
real socialist demands that, and that the socialists have always
insisted that this is not their intention, there indeed seems to be
some psychology necessary to understand why the antisocialists do not
take the trouble to find out first what socialism is.

But here we are not engaged in the mental analysis of those who fight
about socialism. We want rather to ask whether the human minds are
rightly understood by those who tell us that socialism is, or is not,
the solution of our social problems. And if we turn to this
fundamental question whether socialism ought to become the form of our
society, the chief thing will be to avoid a mistake in the discussion
which pervades the largest part of our present-day literature. The
problem is no longer, as it was in the childhood days of socialistic
debate, whether the historical necessities must bring socialism. We
know that socialism will come, if we li