ts would attend the efforts
of an American iconoclast who would venture to ridicule the "eternal
truths" which have been handed down to us in documents of
unimpeachable respectability, like the Declaration of Independence,
and by Fourth of July orators, portly of person and of phrase.

The "eternal truth" phase of socialist controversy seems to be as
eternal as the truth, and must necessarily be so as long as the
movement is recruited by men who bring into it the ideas which they
have derived from the ordinary training of the American citizen.

The other side of the controversy to which reference has been made
derived its philosophy from the experience of the proletariat. This
modern proletariat, trained to, the machine, is a distinct product of
the occupation by which it lives. The organisation of industry in the
grasp of which the workman is held during all his working hours and
manufacture by the machine-process, the motions of which he is
compelled to follow have produced in him a mental condition which does
not readily respond to any sentimental stimulus. The incessant process
from cause to effect endows him with a sort of logical sense in
accordance with which he works out the problems of life independent of
the preconceptions and prejudices which have so great a hold upon the
reason of his fellow citizens who are not of the industrial
proletariat. Without knowing why he arrives by dint of the experience
of his daily toil at the same conclusions as Engels attained as the
result of philosophic training and much erudition. The Church is well
aware of this fact to her sorrow for the industrial proletarian seldom
darkens her portals. He has no hatred of religion, as the atheistic
radical bourgeois had, but with a good-natured "non possumus" says by
his actions what Engels says by his philosophy.

Revolution is an every day occurrence with the industrial proletarian.
He sees processes transformed in the twinkling of an eye. He wakes up
one morning to find that the trade which he has learned laboriously
has overnight become a drug on the market. He is used to seeing the
machine whose energy has enchained him flung on the scrap heap and
contemptuously disowned, in favor of a more competent successor whose
motions he must learn to follow or be himself flung on the scrap heap
also. This constant revolution in the industrial process enters into
his blood. He becomes a revolutionist by force of habit. There is no
need to