tury as a covert appeal for the political equalization not of the people but of the powerful bourgeoisie with the feudal lords of France.

"The doctrine of evolution has put an end to this nonsense. It is bitterly clear that all individuals, races, and species are by nature unequal, through different fortune in heredity and environment; and that these inequalities, as the material worked upon by natural selection, are an indispensable source of evolution. If organisms were equal there could be no selection, no emulation and no development.

"Further, the very character of the struggle for existence is such that evolution strengthens just those acquisitive, competitive and pugnacious impulses which make man so incorrigible an individualistic, so unhappy and unmanageable in the harness of socialism. Nietzsche thought every organism was moved above all by a will to power; and though he underestimated the highly developed instinct to sit down, there was some truth in his analysis, as any one knows who has been intimate with radical parties. Watch their quarrels, their strife for office, their endless divisions; the only reason for having so many factions is that there may be more offices to go around. (Now there is an office for almost every member.) Watch the jurisdictional disputes of tradeunions, those organizations upon which we used to build our syndicalist Utopias; are these disputes settled by right or by might? Every one is just, until he is strong. All this may be changed, but it will take a few years; you cannot abolish the survival of the cleverest by law.

"Only the man who is consciously below the average in power desires equality; the others prefer freedom. Even the man below the average may wish the individualistic game to go on; he is a gambler, and likes the lottery of modern life; you can never convince him that the 'books' are fixed against him, and that he has only one chance in a hundred of winning a place. Range all the persons in a society in the order of their economic ability; those below the mean may support the movement for equality; those above it will oppose it. Since by hypothesis those above the mean are the more capable in the practical concerns of life, what chance has any egalitarian creed? Socialism will never come within the scope of reality until it accepts inequality as fated, and soothes the capable with the promise of superior rewards.

"Acquisition may not be the most profound or intense of the instincts, but it is the most perennial. We tire of eating, or of playing, or of fighting, or even of loving; but we seem never to tire of acquisition. Only the richest and the poorest are relatively free from it; between these extremes, all along the social line, the fever rages. Those who suffer most are the ones who can remember the days when they were poor; 'avarice,' said Balzac, 'begins where poverty ends.' No wonder this impulse is persistent; it has its origin in the search for food, and thence spreads to include all useful, and many useless, things; in every generation it was necessary to survival, and those who had it most were surest to be selected and to propagate their like. Its source is insecurity, as cruelty has its source in

fear. The dog is greedy because he has no confidence in the future, and has many bitter memories of the past. Perhaps when social order is thoroughly secure, and economic provision makes famine rare, men will be less eager to accumulate, and more willing to give and to share. But now (and it will be so for generations to come) the impulse of acquisition, with the impulse of mating, forms the inescapable basis of our lives.

"It is this disease of acquisition," continues the reformed reformer, "that destroys equality as civilization grows. Equality is like equilibrium; the slightest touch of difference brings it to an end. In primitive life, where land was plentiful and tools simple, and the family encouraged mutual aid, equality flourished by comparison with to-day; but when inventions came, and created the division of labor and the specialization of function, men became unequally valuable to society, according to the importance of the varied functions which they performed; and from that moment stratification set in. See its history in America; within a century we have passed from an almost ideal equality to an unprecedented variety and inequality of classes, by the multiplication of inventions and the natural diversity and acquisitiveness of man. The same process of differentiation is destroying socialism in Australia. The same process will destroy it in Russia too, though the state and the army stand ready to defend and preserve it against the greed of man. Nature will out.

"As economic inequality increases, the aspiration to equality develops

as a compensatory ‘ideal'; and socialism appears. It tends to take a political form; for the rise of the bourgeoisie has meanwhile created democracy; and the delusion naturally grows that the poor, being more numerous than the rich, can by voting seize the reins of government and legislate themselves into prosperity and happiness. It is astounding that the disciples of Marx, who insisted that political power must follow and obey economic power, could deceive themselves so long with this reliance upon the vote. Not to speak of the actual numerical majority, the economic forces of America were obviously hostile to socialism, and would have wrecked it had it come to political supremacy. The upper classesthe financiers and investors, the directors of great corporations—were not enamoured of it; the middle classes-the merchants, the manufacturers, the promoters, the managers, the technicians, the professions, the tradesmen-were hostile to it; the lower classes-the farmers, the workers organized in the American Federation of Labor, and the vast unorganized proletariat-were bitterly opposed to it. The farmer feared the nationalization of his land; the skilled worker feared the leveling of the egalitarian scheme; and the unskilled worker resented the socialist attack upon the religions which brightened his dark world with the rays of heaven. The most antisocialist group in America was composed of precisely those manual workers whose good it wished to promote; and the men and women who most effectively labored for it were the intellectuals who would have lost and suffered most in a revolu

tion. Perhaps the proletariat was wiser, and knew that it could never rule.

"Last of all, the movement was continuously bled of its finest men by the fluidity of classes in America, by the leakage of ability from the ranks of the radicals to the classes of the economically established and politically content. Successful men are not revolutionists; and married men are not radicals. Some world-reformers married and forgot the universe in their families; having accumulated a thousand dollars they trembled at the thought that some overturn in Washington might ruin the value of what they had saved, and prevent them from losing it to some real estate poet. Other radical leaders went into business, and succeeded; they discovered the virtues of capitalismthe stimulus to enterprise and initiative, the natural adjustment of reward to risk and energy; and they found it inconvenient to retain their youthful creed. For awhile they continued to call themselves socialists, in loyalty to the traditions of their impecunious days.

"Those who were left in the movement-excepting a few saints and such as could console themselves with the honors and emoluments of office were the less capable men. Failing in the cruel industrial game, they took to writing articles and making speeches; and they atoned for the evaporation of their following by the violence of their speech and the imperiousness of their 'demands.' Unable to fight the common enemy, they fought among themselves; the same rebelliousness that had made them resent this capitalistic world made them object to discipline

within their own ranks. The individualism of socialism ruined it.

"Perhaps it will always be so. Perhaps socialism has always been and will always be a voice in the wilderness, the voice of weakness confronted with strength, of unestablished youth in the face of a world whose doors do not open but must be broken through. It was the voice of Amos standing in the gate, and calling for righteousness; but Amos is gone, and the bankers remain. It was the voice of Diogenes in his tub, and Antisthenes in his rage; but even as they spoke Alexander was preparing to conquer the world. It was the voice of Christ, heard for a moment by the hopeless of the earth; but the earth grew rich, and who dares be a Christian now? It was the voice of St. Francis, calling to us to live like the swallows of the air and the lilies of the field; it is still the voice of holy monks, living in simplicity and without greed; but the world forgets them, and hurries by in its eternal quest for gold. The race has always had its Tolstoys, its Ruskins, its Hugos and its Whitmans; literature is a compensatory foil to the brutalities of life; and socialism, like Christianity, is the ideal which soothes our consciences as we struggle for place and power. If one refuses to participate in the race, life crushes him under the runners' feet; his cry of despair is heard for a moment, but the race goes wildly on, and its rewards are to the swift and the strong. What is has always been, and will always be; the poor we shall always have with us, for they are the necessary wastage of selection. Let us eat and drink and be merry, and forget that we ever dreamed."

IV

So far Sir Oracle Cynical, Mr. Worldly Wiseman, who knows that there is nothing new under the sun, and that all is a chasing after the wind. And yet why should we be so sad in our merriment, and so desolate in our drinking? If socialism aimed at bettering the lot of the workers, it has been displaced only by the fulfilment of its aim. At this moment, through the same window which opens to the first messages of spring, comes the sound of a great machine; a giant mechanism digging steadily, resolutely, a trench along the street. Deep into the earth sink the iron teeth; a great shovel captures the loosened rock and soil and lifts them into a massive truck; in a trice the truck is filled, and by some magic power the heavy load is drawn away. Here is menial work, but no manual toil, and no slavery; only a proud mechanic guiding the great machine, only a calm driver moving the tons of earth with a touch of his foot and the turn of a wheel. There, but for time and genius, go a hundred slaves; one sees them plainly by piercing the present into the past: poor skill-less men, digging wearily, with tools a thousand years old, in ways a thousand years old, with patience a thousand years old, never dreaming that their slavery will end. There will always be slaves, said Aristotle, twenty-four hundred years ago, "until looms weave of their own accord, and machines do without question the bidding of men." Is that vision coming true?

On the wires birds sing; suddenly the ungainly poles that serve the telegraph and the telephone take on

the form and music of poetry. In the wires that strange thing rides which Franklin found in the clouds and which we shall snatch from all rushing streams, harnessing it to the engines that shall do the work of a continent. Far to the north, where our eyes cannot reach, though we know that it is there, a great power-station taps the energies of a colossal cataract, pouring forth energy, as by the miracle of some abounding god, into a thousand factories and a hundred thousand homes; looms weave of their own accord, vast weights are moved, books are printed and bound, and light floods life as if creation had just begun. Everywhere the fluent wonder-worker goes, striking the shackles from a hundred men each step, making mechanical power cheaper than the humblest brawn, compelling men to be only the intellectual factor, no longer needing brute muscle, in the work of life.

It is a strange dénouement to the drama of a century, to that great play which began with the wrecking of the machines in Lancashire, and rose to the climax of a Labor Government in England and a triumphant Soviet. But here is no dictatorship of the proletariat; here on the contrary is its disappearance. Slavery comes to an end not because it is unjust, but because it is too wasteful a way of producing the goods of the world.

Who knows but that socialism itself will come, not through justice but through the growing dissatisfaction of technical and executive minds with the wastefulness and chaos of individualist industry? It would be a pleasant turn of affairs (would it not?) if socialism-the replacement of com

petition by cooperation in our economic life—were to come not from below but from above, not from the weak but from the strong, not from men suffering with poverty, but from men empowered by wealth and enlightened by education. It is not the brave rebel in the ranks who will bring a better order to mankind; it is the wiser leaders of great industry, and the quietly competent inventors, technicians and engineers, who will declare war against waste, duplication, disorder, mediocrity and dishonesty in the factories and markets and offices of the world.

Let us dream. We began with dreams, we end with dreams; and when dreams are no more we shall be animals again.

It is a gathering of the great executives of America, a meeting in quiet seclusion, unknown to the press, or to any but themselves. The heads of the major banking firms are there, representing investments so great that the mind halts figuring them. The heads of the larger industries are there-leaders of corporations which have passed from the stage of ruthless exploitation and public disrepute to a humaner régime in which brutality and waste and incompetence lessen with every year. The heads of the transportation systems are there, flushed with their revived prosperity. The great inventors are there, and the men who have set all the world moving upon rubber wheels. The advertisers are not there, nor the salesmen, nor the philosophers. And the man who has called them together speaks.

"Gentlemen," he says, "we are so rich that mere wealth cannot satisfy us any more. We have organized and

developed great industries; but each of us has buried himself in his part of the nation's life, lost himself in his own tasks. There is something that we have left unorganized, chaotic, almost primitive; and that is our country. Let us organize America.

"There is ignorance in America. We can destroy it. We can build schools and colleges, and keep them free from contamination by rural superstition. We can endow and organize research far beyond the generous beginnings that have been made. We can turn our newspapers into agencies of education, spreading knowledge and science, in an intelligible form, to every village in the land. We can raise by leaps and bounds the mental level of our people.

"There is poverty in America; we can destroy it. We do not need poor men, mindless slaves, as the world once thought it needed them. We need men who can handle complex and dangerous machines, who can be relied upon to think as well as obey. There is no room for slums in a modern city; we can even reap a profit by investing in plans for the replacement of dingy tenements with decent homes. We can support the movement to empower physicians to give contraceptive information: we seek no longer for quantity but for quality in our race. We can stimulate invention to take out of the hands of man all work that is merely physical, or degrading to the mind. We can reconstruct industry so that there will be no place in it any more for men or women too poorly paid to live in comfort and cleanliness. Already some of us have begun to do this. It can be done by all.