“What kind of a Socialist are you?” a rich man asked me the other day.

“Catalogue me with the worst!” I said, “for he who numbers himself with the transgressors is in direct apostolic succession.”

The Socialists are the only people who seem to have the Bible idea of work.  The scriptures make no provision for parasites.  In the commonwealth of Israel everybody worked.  When there was a departure from this ideal, came the prophet to speak for God and the divine order.

Socialists are doing for America what the prophets did for Israel thousands of years ago:  we are pointing the way to simple and right living, to justice, brotherhood and religion.  Socialism is not an ultimate conception of society:  it only paves the way for a divine individualism.  When the fear of hunger is vanished men will have a chance to be individuals.

Men striving all their lives to live—­to merely live—­have no time, no opportunity for a career.

Opposition to the democratic ideal of Socialism is based on ignorance.  Opponents ask for a mechanical contrivance that will wind up and go like a clock.  We are asked questions that only our great-grandchildren can answer.  We are told by the good people that the ideal leaves out God.  The British Parliament proclaimed that bloodhounds and scalping were “means that God and nature had given into its hand.”  A coal baron of Pennsylvania declares that God has entrusted a few men with untold wealth and consigned a multitude to degrading poverty—­that kind of a God the democratic ideal does leave out.  He is a God spun out of the fertile brain of the materialist.  Critics of Socialism assume and herald their own patriotism, their devotion to law and order, but they are usually men who distrust any extension of the functions of the state not directly beneficial to their personal interests.

The Socialists of to-day know that their ideal can not be realized during their lifetime; they are people of vision; they are not saying, “Lord, Lord,” but they are bringing in His Kingdom.

The early Socialists met their worst opposition in a corrupt church and their writings were coloured by the conflict.  We are asked to stand sponsor for all they said.  One might as well charge 20th century Christians with the horrors of the Inquisition!

We are not even willing to stand sponsor for their economics.  Many of their prophecies are yet unfulfilled, the currents of thought and action are not flowing in the direction they anticipated, but the facts they faced have altered little and we moderns have made our own diagnosis, and we have decided on a remedy.  The remedy is not revolution in the historic sense; it is not a cataclysm, it has no room for hatred.  Its method is evolutionary; its watch-word is solidarity, its hope is regeneration.

The process levels up, not down.  It has an upward look.  It will abolish class struggles and divisions.  It will usher in a reign of peace.  Just at present it is a class struggle, a struggle on behalf of that social group of labourers on whose back are borne the world’s heaviest burdens, but it is no more a labour movement than the emancipation of the slaves was a Negro movement.