Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Chapter III. POLITICAL SOCIALISM,?SHALL IT BE PUT UPON THE DEFENSE? HOW? WHY? THE FARMER AGAINST SOCIALISM.?THE HOME-OWNER AGAINST SOCIALISM.?LABOR-UNIONS IN PART AGAINST SOCIALISM.?STRONG SENSE OF PROPRIETORSHIP.?SOCIALISM OF THE CHAIR HAS NO SYMPATHY FOR THE CAPTAIN OF INDUSTRY AND THE SCHOOL OF HARD-KNOCKS J IT WOULD SUFFER MOST IN CATACLYSM OF ITS OWN MAKING. What chance of success, in this country, has Political Socialism? None whatever. This question ought to be raised in all seriousness and answered in all confidence. The answer above is the natural one. By that I mean that it is the answer of logic, good sense, and natural conditions. However, this answer pre-supposes that Socialism shall be put upon the defensive. Default is dangerous. The most casual observer cannot fail to notice that our literature; colleges; churches; universities; newspapers; magazines; humanitarian and reform associations; women’s clubs; and a good one-half of the un-organized, so-called apostles of brotherly love, are tinctured, yea, saturated through and through, with a soft,sweet, optimistic form of the socialist movement. This singular aspect of social affairs very naturally and very properly raises a collateral inquiry : What harm can all these sentimental, altruistic, well-intentioned people do? In contrasting dynamic Socialism with its passive form, a little further on, I shall take up this collateral question and try to show wherein the danger lies. With the observation that, so far, our practical politics, as reflected in congress and state legislation, has happily escaped an open alliance with Socialism, though the recent election of Mr. Berger to Congress from a Wisconsin district and the Reading and Milwaukee elections clearly show that city governments may pass into…
