WHAT IS SOCIALISM?

I

THE MODERN DEVIL

"Knowledge being to be had only of visible and certain truth, error is not a fault of our knowledge, but a mistake of our judgment, giving assent to that which is not true."

-LOCKE, Human Understanding, Bk. IV., ch. xx.

ONE Autumn afternoon, about fifteen years ago, I happened, on my way home from school, to be seated in a street-car behind two members of the faculty of a small college in central Pennsylvania. The pair were discussing the apparently wretched reputation of a third person unknown to me, and the elder educator rounded out his sweeping condemnation with a single fatal phrase:

"Why," said he, "the man's a Socialist!"

It was not so very long after the Haymarket tragedy in Chicago but that the distinctive word contained quite as much terror for me as he who uttered it patently intended it should have for him to whom it was addressed.

Nevertheless, Socialism and Socialists were as vague in my mind as they were awful, and, realizing that I was in the company of the Wise Men, I therefore pricked up my ears for the reply to the question with which the second member of a college faculty in the Year of Our Lord 1893 countered this remark.

66

Just how would you define Socialism, anyway?" he asked.

It was an inquiry, I have since come to know, that few other scholars have been able to answer in anything briefer than a volume; but the sage of the street-car hesitated not.

66

Socialism," he he declared, "is masked Anarchy; but it has no more chance of succeeding than if it dropped the mask."

I do not censure the professor, except perhaps because he spoke professorily; but I do say that he was wrong. Whether Socialism is to succeed or to fail remains, of course, to be seen; yet, succeeding or failing, it is no more Anarchism than it is any of the half-dozen other things that it is popularly believed to be, and, even if it were all of these and more beside, it is recognized by every keen-visioned student of politics and economics as the next great problem that will confront the voters of America.

Upon this point, if upon no other, Socialists and non-Socialists are agreed. Another professor, Mr. Herbert Spencer, several years ago brought the matter into general prominence when, in a treatise called "The Coming Slavery," he predicted, with gloomy forebodings, the ultimate victory of Socialism. Though his wish was so far from being a father to his thought, he may have erred as much on one side as the Pennsylvania instructor erred upon the other; yet, at his command, politicians everywhere opened their eyes to find that a new and still increasing army had advanced upon them as if by night. In this country the astute Mark Hanna flatly stated that old party lines are soon to vanish in the formation of a great conservative coalition to front this latter-day radicalism, and only a twelvemonth ago a President of the United States officially warned his people against “the growing menace of Socialism." From the view of the specialist, practical or theoretical, favorable or opposed, there to-day remains no doubt but that Socialism must soon be met in a desperate, even a life-and-death, struggle at the polls.

In these circumstances, it is the obvious duty of every voter to understand what Socialism

is, in order that he may intelligently support what is good, or, with equal intelligence, cast his ballot against what is evil. Here is a party which, in America alone, has grown from 21,164 votes in 1892 to between 600,000 and 650,000 votes in 1908, and yet the great mass of our voters are quite as ignorant of what it is trying to do as was my street-car professor seventeen years ago. In 1860 the people, as a people, knew what was meant by Abolition and States Rights; in the early Eighties they were familiar with the general outlines of Free Trade, Protection and Tariff for Revenue Only; in 1896 they were able to converse in the vocabulary of an unlimited coinage of silver at the ratio of Sixteen to One; but in 1910, in spite of the growth of education, they cannot give a meaning to the term "Socialism." Why?

The reason is not, after all, so far to seek, and though the Socialists are in some measure to blame for a scornfully doctrinaire attitude rather too common among them, though they are prone to cloak their message in the highly technical language of their own particular brand of political economy, their opponents are almost equally to blame for a refusal to listen or to study. The radical leader is

generally too rapt to produce a primer, and the propagandist of conservatism sees no need of reading his rival's text-books so long as the majority of voters remain ignorant thereof. The result is that the word "Socialism" is now in current use to describe many mutually antagonistic theories and tendencies, nearly all of which have no part in the Socialist programme.

Generally speaking, the term "Socialism. is still one of reproach. It is loosely applied to any innovation of the established social order, or to any new scheme for the relief or change of present social conditions. Mr. Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, though one of the most bitter opponents of Socialism, is by thousands of persons supposed to be a Socialist because of his association with trades-unionism. With him would be instantly ranked, especially if he wore a soft shirt and long hair, any Congressman who introduced a bill for old-age pensions or the national ownership of the cut-glass industry. Socialistic panaceas have, under this definition, been offered alike by Theodore Roosevelt in the White House and Emma Goldman on a street-corner.