The Religion of a Socialist By Mary B. Rules r THE RELIGION OF A SOCIALIST BY MARY B. RULES ■V p’ ■ r / ‘:5 - The Religion of a Socialist in tvj & a A little history for big children. It will help to make the right kind of new history by its truthful and scientific explana- tion of the past. Help to put it in the hands of every grown-up child and a better future will result. Send for my book on the white slave evil, ‘‘A Warning to Young Girls,” 10 cents per copy. Send all orders to Mary B. Rules, Lyceum Building, Socialist Headquarters, Pittsburgh, Pa. I say, shall we rule by the Golden Rule, or by the Rule of Gold that sways. So mightily human interests now in the .keen commercial days? Shall a man be a man in the sense God m^nt when he made in His image fine. Out of the drifting dust of the earth, the human form divine? Or shall he be as broken clod for the growing of other men^s grain? I say, shall we rule by the law of God, or the law of might and main ? Shall we grind men^s bones in the money-mills, in the gourmand hop- per of greed. Unheeding the cry of the crushed-out lives and the blood of the hearts that bleed? Shall a man be clay in the hands of his kind, and bound to the potter ^s wheel. Or an agent free to aspire and attain to the goal of the spirit’s zeal? Shall we make him as ore in the ingot stamp, as a cog in the con- quering mills? I say, shall we sway by the gold of love, or the love of gold that kills ? Shall we bind men’s souls to the barren rock for the vulturous beaks to flay, F or the buzzards of lustful loot to pick, till the soul be withered away ? Shall a man be booty for men more strong, be prize for the pirate’s sack,- f Or a craft toT sail all seas of hope on his own unhampered track ? Shall we make him an admiral on the bridge, or a slave in the galley’s hold? say, shall we rule by the Golden Rule, or ruin by the Rule of Gold? Men lived on this earth — without any doubt at all — more than two hundred thousand years ago. The man whose skull was recently dug up in England^ — or. 4 The Religion of a Socialist, rather, the woman's, since the scientists called it a woman's skull — lived probably, at the very least, a quarter of a million years ago. What we call history is but a day in the life of humanity on this planet, just as the life of humanity, having lasted only a quarter of a million years, is as a day in the whole life of a planet which has existed for scores of millions of years, and will exist during long millions of years to come — barring some rushing together of suns in space or some other cosmic catastrophe. Strange were the men and the women that lived in the night of time, before history began, before flint had been sharpened into tools, before the weeds had been cultivated and the seeds changed into grain, before the animal had been tamed, ridden, milked, and kept for food in the dreary winter. If today you saw in a cage one of your ancestors of a quar- ter of a million years back, you would not know him for a man. And he would not know you. And the cage with strong bars would be necessary to save you. If he could get hold of you he would strangle you with powerful monkey arms and at his leisure eat the marrow from your bones — that was the habit of our respected ancestors of that 250,000 B. C. It would fill you with horror to realize the lives that those ancient ancestors of ours were compelled to lead — yet YOUR blood was in them, and your thought, undeveloped, was in them, as they stood shivering in some icy pool of water waiting for the departure of the animal that had chased them, as they crept into their caves and rolled rocks before the door, as they huddled in the cold biting wind on their platforms built for safety above the lakes, as they fought against nature and against each other — ALL PRACTICING CANNIBALISM, unless they were too feeble to kill their enemy. The dwellers in the buildings would not recognize him as human. And he would never, for an instant, believe that huma^ beings, his descendants, HIS CHILDREN, had thrown those pal* aces of steel and glass up toward the sky, lighting them with the lightning's power, heating them with coal from the depths of the The Religion of a Socialist, 5 earth, talking from one to the other on wires, and out across the ocean without wires. Into the brain of this primitive man you could not possibly force the faintest conception as to what a modern city means. You could not talk to him of iron, for he never saw iron to know what it was. You could not talk to him about building, for he never saw a tool of any kind. A sharp stick, hardened in the fire, used to stab a weak animal of a semi-human enemy, a piece of stone accidentally sharpened by Nature, fastened to the end of a club by the sinews of an animal — such were all the tools that he knew. Yet in the brain of that primitive man with his low fore- head, his high ears, his projecting jaw and all his brutality, there was the spark to which we owe the great city of today, every achievement of the human race, that has slowly risen during a quarter of a million years from this ape-man's condition to our own, and that in other millions of years to come is destined to rise to heights of which we have not the faintest conception. As you look upon the ape-man of a quarter of a million years ago looking at the city he cannot understand, remember that the day will come on this earth when one of our. day would look at REAL civilization and REAL accomplishment hopeless and puz- zled as this man-ape looking at our modern city. In one cave on the hillside, high up, there lived a half-man family. A man and a. woman, with an untanned skin thrown around her shoulders, the hide of some wolf or some other animal, sat on a pile of branches. Around them were children, one for every year, except here and there one year's child might be miss- ing — -stolen and eaten by the man living in the next cave. A wild, dreadful group was this ‘'human family," with huge jaws, big teeth, red hair falling down over the eyes and covering nearly the whole body. The man and woman look out, and below in the valley they see a mammoth go by, a monster elephant of the olden days, with tusks twenty feet long, curling up over his head, a huge trunk, 6 The Religion of a Socialist enormous feet which mean death to everything in its path. In that great hulk there is meat for a whole winter, meat to keep the savage man and his wife and children happy, fat and safe. And the mammoth goes by in safety. No SINGLE ANI- MAL can harm him. He scorns the individual cave man, and all scattered animals. The man in his cave must be content to capture and eat the smaller animals, even insects and small snakes, when nothing , better can be had. But in time the idea of CO-OPERATION, the thought that it might perhaps be well to work together, the idea which changed man gradually from an animal to a man, wakes up in the different caves along that valley. Two of these savage men get together, and three and four, ^and twenty. Instead of trying to murder each other, instead of stealing and eating each other's children, they decide that they will combine, AND GET THE MAMMOTH. With pieces of sharp stick, with their bare fingers and bleed- ing nails, they dig a hole in the ground, spending weeks at the work. They cover the hole with branches and with leaves. By and by the mammoth comes that way. He glances with contempt at the individual monkey-man leaping to one side before him. But - when the twenty or fifty UNITED savage creatures begin pelting him with sharp stones, frighting him with hideous yells and whistling, the mammoth hastens his pace, forgets his caution, moves slowly to his doom, and CRASHES INTO THE DEEP NARROW HOLE DUG BY CO-OPERATION. When the monkey-men, standing around the deep and narrow hole, look down upon the monstrous, struggling, helpless mam- moth, the first of its kind to be caught by co-operation, they look down also, UPON THE BASIS OF CIVILIZATION, upon REALIZATION OF THE IDEA THAT BUILT THE MODERN CITY, THAT FORCE IN THE HUMAN RACEl THAT WILL DO ALL THE MATERIAL WORK THAT IS TO BE DONE BY MEN IN THE FUTURE. Once the cave men found that with co-operation they could kill a mammoth, they began to think more about co-operating and less about killing and eating each other. 1 The Religion of a Socialist, The big beasts that they had slain by working together sup- plied more than enough meat for all. The women and children gathered to see the marvelous thing. Cannibalism went on spasmodically for a long while, when it seemed to be desirable. Few of us are descended from any but cannibal races. And those whose ancestors were not cannibals are the weakest of us; for they had not enough meat to give their children in winter. Soon co-operation worked so well, that groups of men would decide never to kill each other, never to eat each other's children, even when they had a chance to do so. All the inhabitants of a valley would combine jbo kill animals together, and to fight against the inhabitants of other valleys. Thus, through co-operation, there came the building up of villages, little groups of families sticking together and fighting the enemy. Then, through wider co-operation, there came the larger groups of human beings, and finally, what we call nations, and the system of today. That is one system in which a nation combines to protect all those within the nation, but kill, fight, and murder those of other nations, calling murder ‘‘war." What the killing of that old mammoth was to the group of cave dwellers the building of a great skyscraper is to the men of our day. No man, even though he might live for a thousand years, could build a modern building. He could not lift one of the steel beams. If you gave him all of the material, he would still be helpless. But we combine, and we raise these marvelous cities, we throw bridges of steel across the rivers, and tunnels of steel under the rivers. We build engines that will carry one thou- sand human beings more than a mile in one minute. And we stretch a thin wire, a pathway for electricity, and it brings to us a current that we can use to light our homes, to run trolley cars, to electrocute criminals, to carry telephone messages, sing songs on phonographs, wash clothes, sweep the floor — men co-operating have done wonders. 8 The Religion of a Socialist, WHAT IS CAPITALISM? Capitalism is a crime. It is a relic of ancient barbarism tied to the car of Progress. It is the despotism of the feudal age gilded with gold. It is the cruelties of the Inquisition clothed in the respect- ability of the church and veneered with a false civilization. Its enervating power has filled the graveyard of nations. Its hands are reeking with the blood of billions whose lives have been sacrificed on the altar of its greed. Its touch contaminates its victim with moral leprosy and the fumes of its breath are as deadly as the excretions that exude from the Upas tree. It owns its judges and its courts are ante-rooms to hell. It runs an army and navy to exploit helpless human beings^ in foreign lands. It pays the salaries of professors in many universities and its pliable tools pervert the truth and teach false economy. It owns the press and poisons the public mind. It teaches commercialism based upon the inventive of the hog. It presents a glittering temptation to our young men, whom nature, education and taste have equipped for noble callings, to desert these callings and enter the wild scramble for gold. Because of the poverty it has produced it forces our women to labor in factories and sweatshops at starvation wages, and, when thrown out of employment, to accept the wages of sin rather than to starve. It takes little children out of their homes and puts them in the department stores, the factories and mines, where their physical and mental development is stunted, their moral natures perverted, their hopes blighted and their manhood destroyed. Out of the tears, sufferings and anguish of oppressed and enslaved humanity it coins its golden profits. It is heartless, soulless, remorseless and has nothing to arbi- trate. The Religion of a Socialist 9 It owns kings, emperors and presidents and is the sole arbi- trator between the peoples of all nations. It controls the law-making bodies, tramples upon constitu- tions and controls the power to shape the destinies of nations. Capitalism is not capital. It is the hellish system that juggles with real capital — the land and the tools of production — and diverts it from its true purpose. It defies the laws of God and man. It feeds upon the blood of humanity. In it is summed up all the crimes of all the world since the morning stars sang together. It has filled the earth with desolation and horror. It is a thousand times wickeder than the slave markets of the past. It is the destroyer of civilization and the executioner of moral progress. It is ''death on a white horse and hell following after.'’ TEN BILLIONS UNDER THE CONTROL OF MORGAN, COLOSSUS OF WALL STREET. Bent to the imperious will of John Pierpont Morgan, when he was most active in financial affairs, were the ten billions of incorporated capital represented in the following list. His word was law -to the interlocking directorate at the head of their affairs. It represented a financial power probably never before held by a human being : Life Insurance Companies. Assets. Equitable Life Assurance Society $ 462,000,000 New York Life Insurance Co 557,000,000 $1,019,000,000 10 The Religion of a Socialist Banks and Trust Companies. R»esou.rces First National Bank $139,600,000 National Bank of Commerce 226,500,000 Mercantile Trust Company 68,475,000 Equitable Trust Company 63,800,000 Guaranty Trust Company , 88,960,000 Astor Trust Company 15,200,000 Bankers^ Trust Company 53j900,000 Chase National Bank 107,280,000 Mechanics’ National Bank 51,360,000 National Copper Bank 40,300,000 Liberty National Bank 24,700,000 Fifth Avenue Trust Company 19,100,000 Standard Trust Company 18,450,000 $917,625,000 Industrials. Stocks. Bonds. U. S. Steel Corporation $ 868,809,000 $ 593,231,000 Haggin-Morgan Peruvian Copper Mines 25,000,000 Un. Dry Goods Co 51,000,000 International Harvester Co 120,000,000 $1,064, 809,00(f $ 593,231,000 1,064,809,000 $1,658,040,000 Railroad and Transportation Companies. Stocks. Southern Railway $ 179,900,000 $ International Mercantile Marine 120,000,000 Northern Pacific 247,905,000 Great Northern 275,129,000 Reading Co 140,000,000 Central R. R. of N. J 27,436,000 Lehigh Valley R. R 40,441,000 N. Y., N. H. and H 100,000,000 Boston and Maine 31,394,000 Hocking Valley Ry 26,000,000 Chicago G. W. R. R 57,015,000 N. Y., 0. & W. R. R 58,113,000 ^ Hudson & Manhattan R. R 50,000,000 Bonds. 228.701.000 72.684.000 282.499.000 97.955.000 106.654.000 52.851.000 81.639.000 56.849.000 30.373.000 19.912.000 28,000,000 27.173.000 57.920.000 $1,353,333,000 $ 1,143,210,000 1,353,333,000 $2,496,543,000 11 ^he Religion of a Socialist. Miscellaneous Companies. Anglo-American Nitrate Syndicate in Chili North American Company % . Recapitulation. Railroads, etc Industrials Banks, etc Life Insurance Companies Miscellaneous Companies Grand total Transportation Companies. Stocks. N. Y. Cent. & Hudson River R. R $ 250,000,000 Pullman Co 100,000,000 Lake Shore & Michigan South. R. R. . . 50,000,000 Michigan Central R. R 18,700,000 N. Y. & H. R. R. Co 10,000,000 N. Y. & N. R. R. Co 6,500,000 Rhode Island Co 5,381,000 Rutland R. R. Co 9,200,000 West Shore R. R. Co..; 10,000,000 Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe R. R. . . . 381,000,000 N. Y., Susquehanna & Western R. R.. 26,000,000 Interborough Metropolitan Co 155,000,000 $1,021,781,000 Stocks as above Total Miscellaneous Companies. Stocks. American Telephone & Telegraph Co. . $ 300,000,000 Morgail-Guggenheim Alaska Syndicate, about Morgan, City Bank, Kuhn-Loeb Chi- nese Syndicate, about. General Electric Co 80,000,000 Mexican Tel. Co 5,000,000 Adams Express Co 12,000,000 Republic of Honduras loan Republic of Panama (investments) . . . $397,000,000 12.500.000 29.779.000 42.279.000 2.496.543.000 1.658.040.000 917.625.000 1,019,000,000 42.279.000 6.133.487.000 Bonds. 243.414.000 135.400.000 36.000. 000 12 . 000 . 000 5,200,000 11.400.000 50.000. 000 315.400.000 15.600.000 72.000. 000 896.414.000 1.021.781.000 1.918.195.000 Bonds. 214.000. 000 25.000. 000 10 . 000 . 000 14.900.000 36.000. 000 12 . 000 . 000 8, 000,000 319.900.000 397.000. 000 Stocks as above Total $ 716,900,000 12 The Religion of a Socialist Recapitulation. Transportation companies $ 1,918,195,000 Miscellaneous 716,900,000 Total affiliated interests $ 2,635,095,000 The One-Man Power. Morgan^s own banks $ 1,000,000,000 Morgan’s banking interests 6,133,487,000 Morgan’s affiliated companies 2,635,095,000 Morgan’s partners 500,000,000 Grand total $10,268,582,000 THE TARIFF. The real issue in the country is not the tariff, for it is a significant fact that in England and elsewhere there is no tariff, and they are as bad off or worse. The real issue is, ‘'Where do the profits go?'' To the government, or to Morgan, the Rocke- fellers, the Goulds, the Guggenheims, tho Astors, the Armours, etc., any of whom could loan our government money. A private trust is a bad thing, public monopoly a good thing. If the cities, states and national government received the profits of the cor- porations the people collectively would become rich and taxes fall to zero. While corporation stocks are held in other than equal amounts we will have the trust. Why not, therefore, publicly own all land and make things for use instead of profit, except one or two per cent for warehousing and distribution? Men and women would get what they produce, not 15 per cent, as they do now, and wage slavery would cease. Every honest workman has an inherent right to the full product of his work. He invests his life and the lives of his wife and children in it, but under the present industrial system he never receives a full return on the investment. There is always an unpaid surplus which constffutes a moral claim against his employer. The wage which he gets for any particular day's work is not equivalent to a quit claim deed to his employer, because the earning power of that day's work does not end with the day itself. The workman has put into it personal values of Intel- 13 The Religion of a Socialist ligence, skill and industry which continue with more or less per- manency long after the sun sets upon the actual toil expended in the production of it. The Conflict Between Capital and Labor. The constantly increasing tendency of organized labor to array itself against organized capital is becoming very familiar to us. On every hand, however, we hear diversity of opinion as to the cause. Too frequently wholesale condemnation of the labor unit or of the capital unit, according as the speaker's sympathies lie. The labor partisan heaps malediction upon the head of capi- tal — blindly, unreasonably, hatefully staining the hands of capi- tal with all the ‘‘heartaches and thousand natural shocks that man is heir to." The labor organizer makes his appeal directly to ignorance, fear and superstition and germinates in this fertile ground distrust of all institutions with which capital may be in any way connected. He will confess openly that he is forced to appeal to passions in order to induce labor to unite. Obviously union on such a basis must be full of danger. Capital, too, arrogant with success and blind with the pur- suit of greater success, damns the laborer for a savage who would shake the foundations of society if he could. It interprets the strike, not as the protest of a man and a woman who feel that their labors have earned a larger and a fairer share of the bene- fits of new civilization for themselves and their children; it sees a brute and his mate and their cubs who, enraged by the agi- tator's taunts, dare snarl for more and more. This is a grave sickness that has come upon our state, but the restlessness it causes is legitimate. What is called the upper classes of society through brilliant, persistent research and indus- try have attained an outlook on life far broader than a hundred, or even fifty years ago. Education, science, literature, art — everything — have been widened and explored and turned to use as in no former age. Accruing benefits have been divided gen- erously among the comfortably well-off. The moderately suc- cessful man of today commands for himself and his family priv- ileges absolutely unheard of to the man of corresponding station 14 The Religion of a Socialist. fifty years ago. He is entertained by drama and music which he could not have afforded in another age. Printing and pub- lishing have placed in his hands general and special literature which, if accessible at all, have been hitherto luxuries of the very rich. The automobile, together with cheap, rapid land and water transportation, have lengthened the radius of his circle beyond limits ever dreamed of by his grandfather. He may visit this or that part of his country or even travel abroad at comparatively small cost. So we might go on to almost any length in bare enumeration of the advantages and new lines of endeavor which, owing to the marvelous activity of the twentieth century, have come within the scope of the small capitalist. However great the share of higher civilization has fallen to the lot of the moderately well-to- do man, advantages are correspondingly great to him of larger fortune. Going to the top of the scale, our millionaire is limited only by his capacity to grasp and to enjoy. In the face of this great light of civilization which we have kindled, whose rays filter down through the classes to warm apd brighten their lives, can we in fairness draw a screen about the home of the laborer? Bear in mind the nature of his work and remember that he cannot afford the pleasures to be bought with money. Practically all he can earn goes for bare necessities; there is little left when those things are purchased without which he cannot live. Can we not arrange so that a few more of the rays which he has helped to kindle shall reach him? We do not ask for our laborer the identical comforts which our middle class worker can afford. A little more liberal wage, where it can be paid, a few minutes less to his per-diem hours of toil, a few more hours each week for relaxation and rest. It may be that, to him, such small concessions will spell the difference between unrest and rest. If the abuses of monopoly and discrimination cannot be re- strained, if the concentration of power made possible by such abuses continues and increases, and it is made manifest that under the system of individualism and private property, the tyranny of oppression of an oligarchy of wealth cannot be avoided, The Religion of a Socialist. 15 then Socialism will triumph, and the institution of private prop- erty will perish. Leslie M. Shaw, Secretary of the Treasury under Roosevelt,, in his address to the students of Chicago University on March 1,. 1907, said: ''When our manufacturers grow bigger than the United States then there will be a war, the bloodiest war in the history of mankind. The time is coming when the manufactories will outgrow the country and men by the hundreds of thousands will be turned out of the factories. That in itself is not so bad, but when we realize that we pay out in wages as much as all the rest of the world put together we begin to see the seriousness of the situation. "The factories are multiplying faster than our trade and we will shortly have a surplus, with no one abroad to buy and with* no one at home to absorb it, because the laborers have not been paid enough to buy back what they have produced. "What will happen then ? Why, these men will be turned out of the factories, thousands of them, hundreds of thousands. They will find themselves without food. Then will come the great danger to the country, for these men will be hard to deal with. The last century was the worst in the world's history for wars in the world. The next war will be a war for markets and all the nations in the world will be in the fight* as they are all after the same markets for the surplus of their factories." Lincoln on Labor. Possibly no other man had so deeply a feeling of sympathy for the working people as Abraham Lincoln, and it is always in- teresting to read what he said at different times on the relation of capital and labor. A few quotations are given below: "Thank God, we have a system of labor where there can be a strike. Whatever the pressure, there is a point where the men may stop. — Speech at Hartford, 1860, referring to the New ^Eng- land Shoeivorkers* great strike. "I am glad to see that a system of labor prevails in New England under which the laborers can strike when they want to, . . . I like the system which lets a man quit when he wants 16 The Religion of a Socialist, to and wish it might prevail everywhere/' — Speech in New Haven, Conn., March 6, i860. ‘‘I hold that while a man exists it is his duty to improve, not only his own condition, but to assist in ameliorating the condition of mankind." — Speech at Cincinnati, 0., February 12, 1861. Approaching — The World's Greatest Crisis. Lincoln, America's greatest statesman, once said. ‘T see a great crisis in the future, for this continent shall be in the hands of the few." Readers, do you know that within the next twenty years, mankind will be confronted by the greatest crisis recorded in the world's history? Mankind will be tried for its life, by an inevitable supreme power known to science as the unavoidable law of evolution. The question is: Is the human race fit for a higher civilization? If not, then it must decay. The supreme evolutionary law is: Birth . . . Growth . . . Decay . . . and Death. If civilization has reached the end of its growth then it must decay. Note — This law applies to all matter, plants and animals, in fact, to the universe itself. Only science is able to modify its course. The social evolution of the human race is: Savagery, Tribism, Barbarism, Slavery, Freedom,^ Civilization, Decay, Downfall. Study the above illustration. The beginning of the human race is in savagery, which gradually grows into large families or tribes ; these grow into numbers and become warriors ; not know- ing how to make their living, they invade and plunder other na- tions. This stage is known as barbarism. Out of barbarism grows slavery. Slavery outgrows its usefulness and freedom is proclaimed. ''We boast of having liberated 4,000,000 of slaves. Truly we have stricken the shackles from the former bondsman and brought all laborers to a common level, but not so much so by The Religion of a Socialist Vt elevating the former as by practically reducing the whole work- ing population to state of serfdom /' — Horace Greeley. ‘‘When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?^’ God gave to mankind the earth, which was a common heritage. ‘‘I have given you every herb bearing seed upon the earth, and all trees that have in themselves seed of their oWn kind to be your meat, and all the beasts of the earth and to every fowl of the air and to all that move upon the earth wherein there is life that they may have to feed upon." — (Gen. first chapter) Blackstone, referring to this grant,- writes : “That is the only true and solid foundation of man's dominion over external things. The earth, therefore, and all things therein are the gen- eral property of mankind." At the present it is estimated that over $100,000,000 is annually spent in this country alone on advertising, all of which is needless and wasteful. Take for instance the case of Mennens Talcum Powder. It is not a secret preparation; every druggist knows the formula; any pharmacist can put it up in as satis- factory a manner; the material is not expensive. Others were manufacturing it and selling it when Mennen died a millionaire, and he acquired his vast fortune simply through advertising. One page in the Ladies* Home Journal is said to cost $6,000 gross for a single, insertion. Think of the starving men, women and children whom that sum would relieve. What good accrues to the nation at large from such an expenditure? From an economic point of view no more damnable error can be conceived than that of teaching the poor to be content with their lot. To be satisfied with coarsest food, with unhealthy ten- . ements, with shabby clothes, with hobnailed boots, with cheap . furniture and bare walls, to forego the pleasures of books and paintings and music in their homes, to stifie the legitimate aspir- ations of talent, never to penetrate beyond the smoke of factories .. into God's pure air, noriisten to the wondrous melodies of feath- er^ songsters in the brake nor watch the changing pigments of His brush on the floral canvas of tfie fields, but always go on starving from the morning until night with no prospect of com- 18 The Religion of a Socialist fort for the evening of life — surely it is the veriest mockery to preach contentment to the aged v^orker who finds younger men crowding him out as the years steal his strength away. The time comes to him when he is thrown aside like a worn-out tool. His usefulness in the industrial conflict has been a constantly dimin- ishing factor. The future looms up dark and forbidding and he grows tremulous with despair. Every new advance in civiliza- tion, every forward movement in knowledge and culture and freedom has been achieved by the organized discontent of men or by patient bravery of some great soul breaking through the inertia of conservatism and blazing new pathways for humanity. Child Labor. The ministers in hundreds of churches in New York City recently preached against child labor — ministers everywhere should do the same, and it is hoped their sermons will be power- ful^ as savage in denunciation as words can make them. Would that there might stand, in every pulpit beside the preacher, one half-starved, worked-out, white-faced, hollow-chested victim of the Child Labor system. The sight of such a child would do more to arouse the people than any hundred sermons or editorials. Men feel and hate the wrongs that they see. It is hard for them to imagine the unseen. The preacher who is sincere, who believes wTiat he preaches, and FEELS what he believes, will preach on child labor, as he could preach on nothing else. For that which is done to the feeblest child, according to the Bible's teaching, is done to Christ himself — and the sufferings that child labor inflicts upon chil- dren equal in horror and exceed by many years in length of time the suffering inflicted upon the founder of Christianity. Under the child labor system a few men get rich, the public buys products for a cheaper price — DON'T FORGET THAT FEATURE OF THE SYSTEM— and the children are used up as though they were fuel to be shoveled living into the furnace of mill, factory, sweatshop or cannery, AND COME OUT BURNED TO ASHES. Lack of sleep, lack of air, lack of sunshine, long, dreary years 19 The Religion of a Socialist, without play or any happiness, hard blows for the poor, weak, half-starved creature that dozes at its task, a cheap and early grave for tens of thousands, and life stunted for all — such are features of^the child-labor system. The Indian buried his tomahawk in a man's brain, scalped him, and that was the end. Or the victim was caught alive, tor- tured for a while, and THAT was the end. Is not the cruelty that tortures the child as long as it can be kept alive infinitely more shameful, criminal and horrible? You have read of the Indians that captured a mother and her young child, and tortured the mother by compelling her to witness the torture of her child. The mother was tied to a tree, close to the child, and was compelled to look on while the child was put to death by slow agony. Horrible, you say? Too horrible to be believed; human ferocity could not be guilty of such a crime. Why do you say so? Worse things are done in thousands of mills and actories and sweatshops all over this country — and who cares ? You would run miles and risk your life to help that wretched mother tied and watching her child suffer torture. How far will you run, how earnestly will you protest, how independently will you vote to save THOUSANDS OF MOTHERS UNDERGOING AN AGONY AS GREAT? There is less suffering for one mother watching her child tortured to death in a few hours, at most, than for thousands of mothers that must watch their chil- dren slowly dying under the child-labor system. The modern mother of the child-labor victim is not tied to a tree, with red Indians howling around her. But she is tied by poverty, and as helpless as though tied with ropes. You can imagine partly how the woman, caught by Indians, felt as she strained at the cords that held her to the tree. You can imagine her shrieks, her pitiful calling upon God for help, as she watched those Indians put red hot splinters into her child's flesh. You FEEL that. Can you not also feel for the mother that must drag her feeble child from bed at five in the morning "To go to work"? Can you not feel for the mothers that, long 20 The Religion of a Socialist after dark, see their children come home from the mill and sink into heavy sleep, too much exhausted even to eat the miserable food that is ready for them? Can you not feel for the mother painfully dragging herself to work, children tired and white- faced, walking to the mill beside her, a child unborn, and almost ready to be delivered, moving within her? Is not that torture, to conquer nature's plea for rest, to send one child after another to the mill and to the grave, and to know that the child unborn must go the same road? We are not better than savages, but worse; for the Indian was ignorant and had not enjoyed /‘the blessed advantages of nineteen hundred years of Christian teaching." And the Indian did not torture those of his own tribe. In England they found that there was not enougli full-sized men to supply even England's small army. Man after man was measured and found hollow-chested and TOO SMALL. ONE GENERATION OF CHILD LABOR, following me- chanical inventions that made child labor profitable, had'brought about this change in England's men. The women had also de- generated. Many of them lived on tea, gin and bread, and bore babies called “wasters," that no science could keep alive more than a few days after birth. They, too, testified to GREAT Brit- ain's child labor system, and the system of working women, which included fastening a chain to the working woman's neck, passing it between her legs, and making her — thus harnessed — crawl on her hands and knees, pulling small coal cars through the lowest galleries in the mines. Those women had their knees and the palms of their hands as hard as a cow's hoof. Do you wonder that there was degeneration among the poor of England? But England has made the fight that we have not made. The brutality inflicted on children in this country would not be per- mitted in England. We have not seen the full results as yet, for we have been burning up children so fast that they have not lived to make de- generate men and women, and immigration brings constant fresh supplies. But we shall see the results — the horrible results — if the 21 The Religion of a Socialist. country proves so heartless as to make no efficient protest against the torturing of the child in sight of the mother — AND OF THE VOTER. EVERY Sunday should be child labor Sunday in every church, temple, legislature, and home, until child labor shall cease in this country. Child labor is employed simply because it is cheap and un- resisting. There is never any danger of the child workers organ- izing either among themselves or as a trade union. ‘‘Do you hear the children weeping, 0, my brothers? Ere the sorrows come with years. They are leaning their young heads against their mothers. And that cannot stop their tears. The young lambs are bleating in the meadows. The young birds are chirping in the nest. The young fawns are playing with the shadows And the young flowers are blooming toward the west. But the young, yoiing children, 0, my brothers. They are weeping bitterly; They are weeping in the play-time of the others. In the country of the free.” Low wages and the high cost of living force working class parents to send their children to mills and shops to piece out the wages of the father. Under the law you cannot overwork young horses, and you are not permitted to work old ones that are un- derfed, or which have sores made by harness. But under the law capitalists may cut off fingers and whole limbs of young and old working people without fear of legal punshment. The law encourages them to starve any and all of those who strike for better conditions for the wage-earners. The 1900 census gives Maryland over 5,000 children at work. The Census Bfhlletin of 1905 gives 5,553 under 16 years at work in Maryland, of which 3,666 were in Baltimore. The 1915 census gives the number in cotton mills in North Carolina as 31,231. Again the census for Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, 30,000 children employed in southern cotton mills. In the coal breakers boys of eight, ten and twelve years crouch over the chutes, pick- ing out pieces of slate and other refuse from the coal as it rushes past to the washers. Clouds 'of dust fill the breakers and are 22 The Religion of a Socialist inhaled by the boys, laying a foundation for asthma and miner’s consumption, working from 6 a. m. to 6 p. m. for as small wages as 50 to 60 cents a day. The coal is hard and accidents to the hands such as cuts, bruises and crushed fingers, are common among the boys. I wonder if, when people find what they call a clinker in their coal, they know just what that means. It means this: That one boy’s eyes have become dimmed after nine or ten hours’ work; that his fingers are bleeding and he has neg- lected to get out the slate which it is his business to pick from among the coal. In other words, when you find a clinker in your grate or stove it represents the utter exhaustion of a boy from 8 to 10 to 12 years. There are three times as many mangled chil- dren as men in the coal breakers. The Indian tribes surpass us in humanity, for in times of danger they shield their young with their own bodies, while we fling ours into perils three times greater than our own. This is a Christian nation. If proof is needed, count your churches. To most of these child slaves the name of Christ is no more than a cuss word. We ask ‘‘What would Christ do today, were He here on earth?” “What would Christ have thought of child labor?” Would He not have taken His scourge of cords and chased those Pharisees out of the cot- ton mills of the south and the mills of the north? As it is today, one child in every six is a burnt offering to the money god. One dollar in every six has blood on it. We also have a standing army of fifteen thousand dependent children in New York’s asylums and institutions. Hungry School Children. E. J. Tamblin, citizen of Spokane, has got a right notion to the effect that children cannot do their best work in school on empty stomachs. A committee investigated hunger in Spokane schools and discovered that at least 400 childi-en leave home each day without food sufficient to bear them through school hours, and the city is going to be asked to establish luncheons. Of course Mr. Tamblin is right. 'The brain cannot gnaw on problems while the stomach is gnawing on its empty self. It used to be thought that the brain wouldn’t work while the stomach did, but we now understand that this applies only in cases of glut- The Religion of a Socialist, 23 tony. Man is pretty essentially a creature of stomach. Evolution teaches that he had a stomach long before he had either brain or spine, and since the circulation of blood has been at all correctly understood, it has been known that all kinds of effort depend largely upon that part of the human mechanism which builds or renews. Food surely has an effect upon the disposition and men- tal vigor, and hungry children have no more business in school than those Manila Spaniards had before Dewey's men after that luncheon. DEPLORABLE CONDITION OF LABORING WOMEN. This Fact Is Being Brought to Light in New York Investiga- tion— Fingers of Mill Workers Roughened and Torn Until Blood Comes. (By C. H. Tavenner) That women work in iron factories and are employed in other capacities in the great factories of this country under con- ditions that the people of the towns would not believe possible, is being developed by the New York state factory investigating commission. Abraham I. Elkus, chief counsel for the commission, de- clares that in many instanc'es the investigators are finding in the woolen mills women workers whose fingers are worn until the blood runs from picking knots out of the cloth, and that in one instance sick children add to the family income by cracking with their teeth nuts for table use. The report of the commission was so startling that one New York newspaper was loath to be- lieve that such conditions could exist, and employed expert inde- pendent investigators to go over the ground covered by the fac- tory commission. These special investigators found that the conditions in many factories fully justified the commission's report. Both sets of investigators found that many employes in the factories are miserably underpaid; that they are usually treated with less consideration than the machines they operate; that women are doing the work of men because they can be hired 24 The Religion of a Socialist. more cheaply ; that sanitary conditions are abominable, and lead to the breeding of disease, and that little precaution is taken to guard against fatalities by fire. In respect to certain factories in Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse, the testimony is simply damning. It shows that women and children are forced by the "‘speeding up’’ and “piece work” systems to labor under such high pressure, in order to make their living, that th*ey are mangled by the machines they operate, and fall victifhs to disease. But of the 61,246 workers in Buffalo, 30 per cent are women. To these must be added the small boys. The health department shows that 3,821 boys and girls between the ages of 14 and 16 years are at work. How many more there are no one knows. Many work with no certificates and others sell theirs to children under legal age after they no longer need them. They are quoted at 50 cents each, and find a ready sale. Dr. Arthur C. Schaefer, chief of the Bureau of Child Hygiene o^.^ Buffalo, exhibited 250 forged certificates which had been detected and taken up. The Fourth Great Thing. Now we come to the fourth great thing that the woman does. — perhaps the greatest of all : a child comes to her, placing upon her the responsibility of moulding an^ training a human life. “Of course,” comes the protest, “but must the mother alone do this? How about the father?” I recently spoke to a steel worker, who told me that he had never seen his baby’s eyes. He was working on the twelve-hour shift — leaving home before six in the morning and returning after six at night. When he left home the baby was asleep, when he returned the child was again in bed. As he had worked seven days each week for nearly a year he had never had an op- portunity of seeing his baby awake ; he was compelled to take his wife’s testimony as to the color of the child’s eyes. The case is extreme, you may say. Yes, it is. Still it typifies the revolution that modern industry has brought in the home, taking the father away for long hours each day, and throwing upop the mother the entire responsibility of child training. 25 The Religion of a Socialist, For it is not only among the working classes that this condi- tion exists. The well-to-do are also subject to it. The average business or professional man leaves home immediately after breakfast and does not return until night. During the time when his children are playing and learning, the breadwinner is away from home providing the income which makes possible play and education. Perhaps on Saturday afternoons and on Sundays and holidays, if nothing interferes, this man will see his children — in some cases he may even talk and walk with them, securing their sympathy and entering into their lives. But of the constant, intimate contact which the mother has with her children the average father enjoys no share. Thus the transformation of the home, 'the disappearance of the many occupations which were formerly carried on there and the removal bf the father's employment from a place adjacent to the home to some distant factory or office building have placed the duty of child training upon the women of the household. Whatever home training a child receives is, therefore, the train- ing of the mother. She gives the child his earliest impression of the things of this world. And it is these early impression that ultimately count. ‘‘Give me a child until he is seven, and I will stake my reputation on his future," is no idle boast. Whether we are at birth endowed with intellectual powers, or whether our mind is a blank upon which impressions create our thought and character, the impressions of the first six or seven years are the impressions which stay with us longest. EIGHT MILLION WOMEN IN WAGE-EARNING ARMY. Fifty Per Cent of These Workers in United States Under 21— Demand for Female Labor Is on Increase Because It Is Cheap and Profitable to Manufacturer. We have employed in the different industries of the United States a wage-earning army of more than 8,000,000 women, the pumber being steadily on the increase. Fifty per cent of these 26 The Religion of a Socialist. workers are under 21 years of age and are therefore in need of protection. It is not that it is new for women to labor, for they have done that always; but it is that she must now labor under new conditions, in manufacturing establishments where the conditions of work are quite different from the home, the old manufactory. This change, and the demand for women in the industrial world, has not been because it was best for her, but because woman's labor is cheap labor and therefore profitable to the manufacturer. This change has come, too, before woman has been prepared for industrial life, so that they are forced to accept conditions not conducive to their welfare. Capital, too, has not yet adjusted itself entirely to the equity of the situation, with the result that many hardships exist that must be removed. The lack of uniform laws governing the labor problem for women is one of the chief causes of the unsettled status of these workers. A few states have good laws, but many of our states have failed to recognize the economic value of protecting them, using competition as an excuse for not legislating protection and humane treatment. Vocational training so that women can enter the industrial world as skilled workers is the first requisite, then organizations among themselves, with legislation to protect them and then fac- tory inspection by women. Under this latter head will come cleaner morals, better health and working conditions. Men in- spectors are rather inclined to overlook many derelictions, not understanding women's needs. Twenty-two states have recognized the need of women in this work and have placed women on their staffs of factory in- spectors. New York has 15, Pennsylvania 10, Ohio 8, Wisconsin 5, Minnesota 4, New Jersey, Michigan and Illinois 3, California and Maryland 2, and the remaining have 12. In none of these states, however, are there enough women inspectors to do all the work there needs to be done. There should be in every state one woman factory inspector for every 25,000 women employed in the industries of the state. This inspection should not be limited to factories, but should include telephone systems, restaurants, 27 The Religion of a Socialist. laundries and small establishments in second-class cities. In these places of business women work fourteen and sixteen hours a day with no one to champion their cause and protect them from imposition. Nine-tenths of the sweated work of this country is done by women. I have no wish to give statistics of the wages in par- ticular trades. These are readily accessible to all. They are sad- dening and horrible. The life-blood of women that should be given -to the race is being stitched into our ready-made clothes, is washed and ironed into our linen, wrought into laces, embroid- eries, feathers and flowers, it is poured into our adulterated foods, pasted on our match and pin boxes, and spent on the toys we buy for our children, the china that we use for our foods and the tins in which we cook them are damned with lead poison that we offer to women as the reward of labor. It is these wrongs that the mothers of the race have to think out and alter. There is no one among us who is guiltless in the matter. Things that are continuously wrong need revolutionizing and not patching up. Men have all fields open to them, which is not true of women’s work. Men have no scruples to take women’s work. Not only do men bake and brew, they even knit and spin; they sell lace and ribbons; they dress women’s hair. What work have they left women? The under-paid drudgery of the home, the sweat- shop that men despise. But women are growing tired of this division. Woman is born no different from you, my brothers, except that she vdll sooner sacrifice herself to feed the children. In industry she stands where your fathers stood before they learned to co-operate. You, brothers, got every good thing you possess by standing together. Now I want to advise you to help you. Brothers, we w'omen want to stand together and we want you to help us. If you won’t do it for the sake of justice, do it for the sake of your own bread and butter. Your only safety lies where our safety lies — in equal pay for equal work. You have an opportunity to strike a tremendous blow for freedom, not only of working men, but the freedom of working women. You know that the ballot is the great weapon which the working class can use whenever that class gets ready to use it. You know also that 28 The Religion of a Socialist the working class is about to use that weapon for its emancipa- tion. Do you not want your sister, mother and daughter to be able to use that ballot with you? Are you going to allow your- self to be weakened in the great conflict by having those so closely allied with you in the struggle deprived of a chance to aid you? Remember that there are millions of women — daughters and sisters, wives and mothers — who are obliged to work and slave in order to live. ‘ These are all members of the. working class and have the same interest as the fathers, husbands, brothers and sons. Will you deprive them longer by your carelessness and inactivity of the privilege of participating in the making of the laws which govern thejr condition? The laws of today, in a great many states, place women upon the same basis politically as mules, imbeciles ^nd criminals. A mule cannot vote (if he could he would raise a ruction) ; an imbecile cannot vote (supposedly, but a lot of them do) ; and criminals who are in prison are denied the right to vote. Do you want your wife and mother kept longer in this class? No, I do not believe it. Give your wife, daughter, mother, sister a chance to stand with you and win or lose with you in your struggle against your oppressors. Here are a few of the laws the enfranchised women will vote to have strickep from the books : Legal age of marriage of young girls, as low as 12 years in four states, 13 in one, T4 in nine; children working nights in factories from 6 p. m. to 6 a. m.; laws forbidding the legitimatizing of a little child by a subsequent marriage; laws authorizing fathers to will away the custody of unborn children; laws giving the father the legal guardianship of the child; en- titling the husband to the earnings of a wife, received in con- nection with household duties, such as boarders, taking in wash- ing, sewing, etc. — a New Jersey law, In many states wife and child desertion is not a crime; the joint earnings of a husband and wife belong to the husband;, father, and not the mother, entitled to the services of children. The age of consent is ex- tremely low in some states — ten years in Georgia, and twelve in several. Revoking a woman's will if she is a widow and marries again ; revoking the guardianship of a widow over her children The Religion of a Socialist 29 if she marries again ; low punishment for rape, making seduction a misdemeanor — a breach of manners. One of the significant statements in the uninformed and mis- leading tirade of Senator Tillman is that suffrage is coming rapidly, but in the southern and eastern states there is hope that it may be prevented and stayed. Had Senator Tillman been bet- ter informed in regard to the activities of women suffragists in South Carolina, and especially in Alabama, Louisiana and Texas during the past year, he would not be so sure of the backward spirit of the south or that it would become a block to progress of the suffragists' movement. Personally I am looking for suffrage to win in any one of the states of the union, and it might be that South Carolina would be among the first to grant it to women. It is only a .matter of time, and that a short time, for north, south, east and^'west, and the senator and all who stand with him would better prepare for the full enfranchisement of the Ameri- can citizen, regardless of sex. Two remarkable and significant victories have been gained in our country and full enfranchisement fcfr women in Norway. Full enfranchisement for the women of Alaska and a slightly modified franchise in Illinois has added greatly to the voting strength of the womanhood of America. Both of these victories are secured without the necessity of state-wide campaigns to win the vote of the men citizens at the polls. Were the constitution of the other states so formed that this method could be followed in each there would be little difficulty in securing suffrage in every one. There are few states whose constitution m^es it possible. This is the principal reason why it is so much more difficult to secure votes for women in America than in many monarchies of Europe. INGERSOLL’S VISION OF THE FUTURE. A vision of the future rises. I see a world where thrones have crumbled and where kings are dust. The aristocracy of idleness has perished from the earth. I see a world without a slave. Man at last is free. Nature forces have by science been enslaved. ^Lightning and light, wind and wave, frost and flame, and all of 30 The Religion of a Socialist the secret subtle powers of the earth and air are the tireless toil- ers for the human race. I see a world at peace, endowed with every form of art, with music myriad voices thrilled, while lips are rich with words of love and truth. A world in which no exile sighs, no prisoner mourns, a world on which no gibbet’s shadow falls, a world where labor reaps its full reward — where work and worth go hand in hand, where the poor girl trying to win bread with a needle — the needle that has been called ‘'The asp for the breast of the poor” — is not driven to the desperate choice of crime or death, of suicide or shame. I see a warld without the beggar’s outstretced palm, the miser’s heartless, stony stare, the piteous wail of want, the livid lips of lies, the cruel eyes of scorn. I see a race without disease of flesh or brain, shapely and fair, married harmony of form and functions, and as I look, life lengthens^, joy deepens, love canopies the earth, and over all, in the great dome, shines the eternal star of human hope. THE RELIGION OF A SOCIALIST. Socialism and the Nation. Our party has suddenly attained tremendous influence in the nation, casting nearly 1,000,000 votes for president — more than doubling the vote four years ago. If it were true^ that Social- ism were antagonistic to religion, such a growth in its political strength would mean disaster to the moral future of this nation. But if it is true, as I believe and have attempted to show you why I believe it, that Socialism is a projection of intelligent mor- ality on the political stage, then that vote is full of hope for all who desire to see this nation morally redeemed. Does Socialism destroy the home? And is Socialism against the flag ? These two questions make the proposition a moral one. I was challenged last Sunday night by a young gentleman who professed himself as horrified because I had forsaken the gospel and was meddling with politics; although my address last Sun- day night dealt largely with so plain and simple a question as the eighth commandment, “Thou shalt not steal.” And destruction of the home is certainly a moral question. Is it true that the increased Socialist vote means a peril for the home? Is it true The Religion of a Socialist, 31 that in the first place woman suffrage, for which we stand, im- perils the honor and purity of womanhood; and is it true that Socialism and free love are synonymous? That idiotic statement, still met with though not so often aS' formerly, that Socialism advocates free love, is based on an ut- terly degraded idea of woman in the minds of those who make it.~ Socialism proclaims common ownership of means of production. If one assumes that a woman is merely a means of production’ of life, one logically comes to the conclusion that community of wives is a natural result of this doctrine. But Socialism does not hold any such bestial theory. It regards woman as the spiritual equal of men; inferior to man as regards masculinity; superior to man as regards femininity; and in everything equal to man as regards humanity. There is no woman who will ever be as much of a man. There is, on the other hand, no man living who will ever be as good a woman as any woman living. But there is no common standard whereby we can say that masculinity is either inferior or superior to femininity; because both are equal and integral halves of the common whole — humanity. The unit of society is neither man nor woman, but both, and something more — that is, the family. Whatever proposition individual Socialists may have ad- vanced as to marriage, the essential thing about it was nearly always to proclaim the sacredness of family life. That is to say, easy dissolution of marriage, where it has been advocated at all, has been based on the proposition that slave marriages are an injury to family life; that the economic bondage of women forces them often into marriages that are revolting and. degrading to the life of their families ; and that in order to keep the family pure, it is necessary to make it possible to release persons once mar- ried, from a yoke which by reason of disease, crime, or depravity of one or the other partner has become an evil thing. Most of those Socialists, in other words, who advocate the lightening of the marriage yoke, do so for the preservation of the home, and not for its destruction. But now let me say that there are certain homes whose de- struction ig eagerly sought by Socialism. I refer to such homes 32 The Religion of a Socialist. as exist in thousands of mill towns, in thousands of tenements in this city; homes, so-called, where parents and children, from the tiniest tots up to gray-haired grandparents, toil like cattle from early dawn until utter exhaustion compels them to cease, late at night, in order to scrape together barely enough to keep a little warmth in their bodies and a miserable roof over their heads. Such homes as those in many manufacturing centers, where little children are starved to death while their parents slave like dogs. Such homes as we can see here on the East Side, with twenty people living in a single room; where decency is preserved only with the most terrific efforts, if at all; where the xuajor portion of the fruits of the toil of a whole family goes to a landlord who watches them with the eyes of a vampire, eagerly waiting the chance to raise their rents and steal a little more from their pockets — these homes must go! The extension of the public domain to include mines, quar- ries, oil wells, forest and water power for the improvement of the condition of the working class by shortening the workday so Chat all may share the benefits that machinery has so far brought only to a few; for securing to the worker a rest period of not less than a day and a half each week; for forbidding the employ- ment of children under 16 ;^ears of age; for abolishing official charity and substituting in its place compulsory insurance against old age, disease, accident, invalidism or death; for a graduated income tax; for initiative, referendum and recall, and many sim- ilar measures. Now if you can show me where the mass of the people will suffer from such measures as these I shall be obliged to you, for I assure you I am unable to see the danger. Of course many young men, and old ones too, who now pass-their time in bored idleness, while upheld on the weary shoulders of the workers of the world, will have to climb out of automobiles and earn their own living. To them this is an untold calamity and they cry aloud at the injustice of it; but I think the duty of every human being is to be a good enough human being to get his own living, and that every man who is willing to work shall have work and shall enjoy the product of his labor. 33 The Religion of a Socialist, JOIN THE SOCIALIST PARTY. You should join the Socialist party because it is a working-- man's party and advocates the economic interests of workingmen. ’ The Socialist party is composed of workingmen, supported by workingmen and controlled by workingmen. All other parties are supported and controlled by capitalists, although largely com- posed of workingmen who are ignorant of their interests. The Socialist party proposes that workingmen shall have the opportunity to labor and get what they earn. Workingmen will not have this opportunity as long as the rnachinery of toil is, owned by the capitalists.' Workingmen, in order to get justice and secure freedom, must obtain control of the mills, mines and factories in which they must work. The Socialist party is an organization of work- ingmen which has for its object the capturing of the machinery of industry by the working class for the working class. Under Socialism workers will get what they earn, and all will be workers. We will get Socialism when a sufficient number of working- men join the Socialist party and help get it. SOCIALISM IN SIXTEEN WORDS. Collective Ownership and Democratic Management of Things Collectively Used, and Private Ownership of Things Privately USED. CONVERTED BY PRAYER AND PRISON. The true aim of Socialism and the main achievements of So- cialism are, first, equality of opportunity to every man, woman and child; second, the full product to the producer. The Coming Nation printed the story of the battle of the girls of the Kalamazoo Corset Company. In that was told how, when the courts and the police .were all turned against them, the girls gathered every day and prayed for relief. The prayer was written by the president, Josephine Casey. It is one of the strong- est, simplest heart cries that ever rose from suffering human beings. The prayer as written and uttered by the girls is as fol- lows: 34 The Religion of a Socialist. ^'Oh, God, our Father, you, who are* generous, who said, 'Ask, and ye shall receive,'' we, your children, humbly beseech you to grant that we may receive enough wages to clothe and feed our bodies and just a little leisure, oh. Lord, to give our souls a chance to grow. "Our employer, who has plenty, has denied our request. He has misused the law to help him to crush us, but we appeal to you, our God and Father, and to your laws, which are stronger than the laws made by man. "Oh, Christ, thou who waited through the long night in the Garden of Gethsemane for one of your followers, who was to betray you, who in agony for us didst say to your disciples, 'Will you not watch /one hour with me?' give strength to those who are now on picket duty, not to feel too bitterly when those who promised to stand with us in our struggles betray us. "Oh, God, we pray you to give to the fathers and mothers of our strikers a chance to bring up their helpless little ones. "You, who let Lot and his family escape from the wicked city of Sodom, won't you please save the girls now on strike? Help us to get a living wage. "Oh, Lord, who knowest the sparrow's fall, won't you help us to resist when the modern devil who has charge of our work- takes advantage of our poverty to lead us astray. Sometimes, oh. Lord,, it is hard. Hunger and cold are terrible things, and they make us weak. We want to do right. Help us to be strong. "Oh, God, we have apf)ealed to the ministers, we have ap- . pealed to the public, we have appealed to the press. But iflall these fail us in our need we know that you will not fail us. Grant that we may win this strike and that the union may be strong, so that we may not need4:o cry so often, 'Lord, deliver us from temptation.' "We ask this. Lord, for the sake of the little children, help- less and suffering; for the girls who may some day be mothers of children, and for those girls who dislike sin, but are forced into it through poverty. "Oh, Christ, who didst die on the cross, we will try to ask The Religion of a Socialist 35 you to forgive those who would crush us, for, perhaps they do not know what they do. ‘'All this we ask in the name of the lowly Carpenter’s Son, Amen.” For three weeks this little group of girls begged on bended knees that they might have a chance to live in freedom from the hideous temptations that were forced upon them. The prayer produced no results. The churches of the city of Kalamazoo were deaf. Then Miss Casey, with her sister strikers, went on the streets to ask their fellow workers to maintain their solidarity in the fight against these terrible conditions. The response was quick and the president of the union, with several others, was thrown into jail. Now comes The final chapter in the .story. During all the time that Miss Casey was in Chicago, although she had worked with the Socialists in trade union meetings, she had always re- fused to accept their position politically. Bu^ what no agitator ^ could have accomplished, what no argument and urging could have brought about, the three weeks of unanswered prayer, the hardness of those who claimed to follow the “Lowly Carpenter’s Son,” the fact that the only body that did respond to this heart- breaking prayer was the so-called irreligious, atheistic, home- breaking Socialist party, that went into the streets to share the same fate and fight the same battle that was being fought by the corset makers. These things ended in a letter that was received by the editor of the Coming Nation a few days ago that began, “Dear Comrade,” and says: “You might like to know that since coming to jail I have joined ‘the Socialist party. I suppose the same visfon of what the labor struggle really meqns came to me while caged and looking through bars as it did to Eugene Debs years ago when he was in a similar position and I firmly believe will come to every labor official unjustly imprisoned.” And this letter is signed Josephine Casey. WHY RENTS ARE HIGH. Have you ever stopped to figure out what makes rent so high ? In the country you can buy an acre of ground often for as 36 The Religion of a Socialist, little as $100. The dirt in"it is as good as the dirt in a small city lot which costs you perhaps $2,000. Put a house on it costing, say, $3,000, and for $3,100 you have a home which, if moved by a fairy to the crowded part of a modern city, would make you independently rich for life. Now, there is very little difference between the prices of stone, brick, mortar and lumber in the country and in the city. The difference in the wages of the house builders is greater, but not nearly enough to account for the tremendous difference in the selling price of the finished home in country and town. Thus the only big thing left to account for the higher city value is that in the city more people want land. And that, of course is true. They want it because they have to have it; be- cause it is as necessary for their existence as water or air. Yet how often do we see a few persons buying control of great tracts of land in or near a city, fencing it in and refusing to let people who heed land badly have access to it until they pay a fancy price. Imagine the howl that would go up if private individuals should in a similar manner get control of large reserves of the water we drink or the air we breathe and hold us all up in the mere act of living until we came to their terms for drinking water or oxygen. The owner of * idle land in a city, of course, adds nothing by such ownership to the city’s growth. On the contrary, he retards it. Makes it the more difficult for an industrious man, a pro- ducer, one who is daily adding t^ the community’s wealth, to find a place to lay his head. • Rents are high, then, because the big growth in land values due fo the growth of our cities, has been permitted to pass into private pockets, and chiefly the pockets of a few in each com- munity, while the many have to pay increasing tribute on the very wealth which their own industry has created. Rents cannot be pulled down suddenly unless by the destruc- tion of all values; but, we can begin to reduce them gradually and The Religion of a Socialist, 37 equitably whenever we shall set forth to untax improvements on land and increase the tax on unearned increment. There is no reason or justice, is there, why you, a worker, should have to spend a fourth of your income for rent, when up the next street some chap who never did a day's work in his life gets from ground rent on inherited real estate an income which enables him to house himself in luxury on its tenth, hundredth or thousandth? Moses preached the good law. Leviticus XXV ; 23. : “The land shall not be sold forever, for the land is mine (God's) for ye are strangers and sojourners with me." Leviticus XXV; 36.: “Take thou no usury (profits) of him, or increase; but fear thy God; that thy brother may live with thee." NOTE — Our teaching is in perfect harmony with God's law today. Listen to what the prophets say will overtake us if we don't keep the God's or good-law: FALL LIKE ROME'S WAITS OUR NATION, SAYS J. HAM LEWIS. Stock Exchange Corners of Today Like Crassus' Monopoly in Town Lots. Author of New Book. “The Man with the Pink Whiskers" Compares Ancient and Modern Republics. Washington, Sept. 25. — The 'same conditions which existed in Rome just before the downfall of the empire are to be found in the United States today, and unless reform is Effected they will have the same results. These are the conclusions of Senator James Hamilton Lewis of Illinois, in his book just published, “The Two Great Repub- lics, Rome and the United States." “The monopoly of Crassus in town lots in Rome, and the exclusive rjght to dictate the price of farm products by the Fabii and their successors, which produced riots in the country and 38 The Religion of a Socialist. uprisings in the city, have their parallel in the ‘corners' on the stock exchange and grain ho’tises of America, and in the monopoly in oil and its elements," says Senator Lewis. “These methods and the domination of legislative bodies by these massive interests, the corrupting of the assemblies of the people and the defining of the courts have created a revolt in the hearts of the Americans and awakened an insurrection among the citizenship. These, if'not abated by government action, will surely produce a parallel in the results which befell the Roman empire." Senator Lewis also pays his respects to the demagogue^ho capitalizes such prestige as he may have. Referring to Garbo, he says : “The life of this politician seems an excellent example, in proof of the statement that the demagogue seeks the favor of the people only for his own advantage and that as soon as he has acquired such favor and has become a person of influence, his next step is to sell himself, now valuable on account of the politi- cal power he has acquired through his hypocrisy toward the peo- ple, to the special interests." CHRISTIAN SOCIALISM. Editor the Tribune: Rev. John Henry Troy recently preached on the “Collapse of Socialism," in which he stated without warrant that “there is not a philosopher in the world's history who stands out more strongly against Socialism than Jesus Christ." I call for the proofs. The undersigned feels safe in assuming that Mr. Troy stands quite alone in his assumptions. New York ministers recently organ- ized a ministers'* socialistic conference, the object to make it a national one. Three hundred of the clergy — Unitarians, Episco- palians, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians — are Socialists now by open confession. Many times this number are secretly in sympathy with the cause. Rev. John D. Long, pastor of the Park Side Presbyterian church, Brooklyn, was secretary of the conference. Clergymen, he said, have come to the conclusion that Christianity will not work under a competitive system and that the inauguration of Socialism is necessary for civilized human 39 The Religion of a Socialist beings. Therefore it is the duty of the church to step in anc^ad- • vocate Christian Socialism. H. H. Rogers said business is war, and if, as General Sherman said, war is hell, then business under competitive system must be hell also. I believe that the Socialism advocated by the New York ministers is the Socialism of the primitive church portrayed in the second of Acts, looming up as the prospective goal to which a federated church of the near future is tending. H. S. TANNER. % Los Angeles, Cal. An the early days of our race the Almighty said to the first of mankind, ‘Tn the sweat of thy face thou shall eat bread,’’ and since then, if we except the light and air of Heaven, no good thing has been or can be enjoyed by us without first having caused labor, and inasmuch as most good things have been produced by labor, it follows that all such things belong by right to those whose labor produced them. But it has so happened in all ages of the world that some have . labored and others have, without labor, enjoyed a large portion of the fruits. This is wrong and should not continue. President Taft, of the United States of America, in his speech at Boston, December 30, 1907, said: 'Tdleness is the be- ginning of evil.” The increase in unemployment means the in- crease in crime, divorce, suicide, murder, hold-ups, prostitution and all-round degeneracy. See by the statistics how the increase in crime correspofids with the increase in unemployment. The danger of the approaching crisis will be the unemployed. Mil- lions will be on the highways and byways without work and con- sequently homelessr and hungry. Will the owners of factory, mine or mill put all men to work when their warehouses are full and they can find no foreign markets? No, they never will. Lincoln’s Voice on Labor in ’65. President Lincoln said, ‘Tt is assumed that labor is only available in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody owns the capital and somehow by the use of it induces him to labor. Labor is prior to and independent of capi- tal. Capital is only the fruit of labor and could not have ex- 40 The Religion of a Socialist. isted if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital and deserves much the higher consideration. I bid the laboring people beware of surrendering the power which they possess and which, if surrendered will surely be used to shut the door of advancement for such as they and fix new disabilities and burdens upon them until all of liberty shall be lost. Therefore, to secure to each laborer the whole product of his labor, as nearly ai^ possible, is a worthy object of any government. America, ivith its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. When- ever they grow weary of the existing system they can exercise their constitutional rights of amending it. Not alone chattel slaves and serfs, But 'wage slaves also 5,re used simply, only al- ways as domesticated human animals to produce surplus for their masters. Slavery was a surplus game. Serfdom was a surplus game. Capitalism is also a surplus game. By pinching, repress- ing, restricting the wage-earner’s life the capitalist employer skims off a surplus. By belittling the wage-earner’s life the emr ployer increases his own life — with the surplus legally filched from the life of the wage-earner. Surplus — stolen life — by means of the wage system, legally pumped from the veins of the wage- paid toilers. With this surplus the capitalist buys his fine yachts, automobiles, monkey and poodle dinners, pays his politi- cal party campaign expenses, bribes city councils, state and na- tional legislatures, exhorbitant prices for the articles their toil and skill have brought into existence. The nten responsible for these conditions are called good Christians; they attend church on Sunday. They Worship Mammon frantically six days of the week and God for an hour on the Sabbath. Capital Heartless, Divine Declares. Revolution Likely to Come Any Day, Hibernians Are Told. Sydney, May 3. — Dr. Kelly, the Roman Catholic primate of Australia, addressing the ILibernian Society here, referred to the recent strikes and the threats of strikes and said: '‘The contention and strife between capital and labor may develop into a revolution any day, because capital is heartless 41 The Religion of a Socialist. and renders labor desperate, and because labor is emboldened by the success attending violence. Society with us is in a very parlous and dangerous condition.^' Dr. Kelly added that a man must not put his hand into an- other man's pocket unless he is starving and his tongue is hang- ing out with thirst. Then he may take from another man's pocket. How to Fill the Pews. We like the spirit behind the plan of that Cincinnati clerg- man who has opened his church evenings to the unemployed, serving free food, good advice and an invitation ^to use the idle pews as cots if they have nowhere else to lay their tired heads. That is .most decidedly the spirit of Christianity as exemplified in the teachings and practice of Christ, and the early Christians. He preached — yes; but He also fed the hungry and healed the sick and comforted the miserable. And we guess it wasn't half so much His preaching, unsurpassed as that was, as it was His practicing that made the common people hear Him gladly and follow him with affection. In each of our cities are great, fine churches, representing millions invested, but empty and dark most of the week and not any too well filled or\ Sunday. And outside, on the streets, are able men, who have no work and are hungry — some, also, bitter men, who think the church is of no use to them and who some- times, with an oath, doubt whether even God cares. Rev. A. N. Kelly of Cincinnati believes that God does care and that at least one church can help. He doesn't stop with be- lieving and saying it — he is PROVING it. If Christ were in every church, do you suppose that its doors would stand closed and its kitchen idle while hunger stalked the town? Then why isn't your church working? Did we hear you say ‘T have no church"? Yes, you have; you have Rev. Mr. Kelly's church. If you lived in Cincinnati could you be kept from lending a hand* to a church like that? Nobody knows the suffering, the struggling of the men and women in this country and in every country piteously trying to be 42 The Religion of a Socialist. better than somebody else, or to be recognized by somebody else as an equal. The smallest town has its ‘‘society leader,'’ bliss- fully vain in her belief in her own superiority, and its crowds of bitterly disoppointed, striving, struggling women — ^d men as well — trying to enter the charmed circle of silly social vanity. Unhappily, men who believe themselves sincere and that would like to be sincere, thousands and hundreds of thousands of them, are apparently good and unselfish, because they have no opportunity to be otherwise. There was a leader long ago, who spoke neither of vanity nor of wealth. He spoke of the poor that needed protection, of chil- dren that weye outrageously and cruelly treated, of women, shamefully judged and unjustly treated. He had nothing to offer to man's vanity, nothing to offer to his greed. THEY CRUCIFIED HIM. There are two struggles in America, one for advancement so- cially, and the other for advancement financially. Emile de Layeleye, the eminent Belgian economist, who had the deepest reverence for Christianity as a social force, said. “If Christianity were taught and understood conformably to the spirit of its founder the existing social organism could not last a day.” James Russell Lowell said: “There is dynamite enough in the new testament, if illegitimately applied, to blow all our exist- ing institutions to atoms.” William Morris stated: “A society which is founded on the system of compelling all well-to-do people to live on making the greatest profit out of labor of others must be wrong.” If the establishment of a just system will not be able to change the selfish nature of man, then it may be easily under- stood why religion and the church have so sadly failed to change human nature and to establish righteousness among men. The scriptures tells us that man and wonian were created in order that this race might be perpetuated. If the scriptures tell the truth a child has the right to be born, and if that be true the child has a right to a place to be born in. If that is true, when that child becomes old enough it has a right to go to school and 43 The Religion of a Socialist. acquire an education. If that be true, when that child becomes old enough it has a right to go to work, but no man has the right to say, '‘Before this child shall work for me it shall giye me three- fourths of what it shall produce.'' , This is wrong and unjust. We pray for the kingdom of Heaven 364 days in the year and on election day we vote for hell. You can't change the present system of society that way. You will have to vote as well as pray. Vote that the collective ownership and democratic management of things collectively used, and private ownership of things pri- vately used. This is Socialism. GATES CHAINED AND PADLOCKED, INSTEAD OF “LIB- ERTY ENLIGHTENING THE WORLD." A pair of iron gates chained and padlocked shut — we sug- gest this as a substitute for the statue at the entrance to the New York harbor — that figure representing Liberty enlightening the world. Why should we longer keep the statue there? When the symbol ceases to have a meaning, when the memorial stands for something that is forgot, it is time for both to make way for the new. The gates and padlock are proper emblems^ .of our newer thought. ^ An editor comes to our port who is charged with libeling a king. We slam the door in his face. Shades of Thomas Paine! Have we gone back to that superstition about the Divine Right of Kings? Is it possible that there are things which a man who opposes monarchy must not say about a monarch — the saying of which will be an offense in the republic of the United States? Is there such a thing as a political offense which will close the gates of this city to the refugee?. If Garibaldi were aliv£ would we class him as an undesirable immigrant and turn him back in an Italian ship? And even this old adventurer, Cipriano Castro — is he not an ex-president of a republic? — one of that sisterhood of republics to the south, about which we like to make glowing after-dinner speeches? And are not he and Washington in the same political class — revolutionists? If the president of Portugal should decide 44 The Religion of a Socialist, to come and live with us would we arrest him and turn him back on the next returning steamer? Possibly. It was many months before our state department gave any recognition to the Portugese republic. Several mon- archies showed us the way. And we have not recognized the Chinese republic yet. Perhaps we are waiting for the outcome of Morgan’s syndicate, which seeks a mortgage on the new regime. When the loan has been properly subscribed and the people of the new republic are fittingly laid under interest tribute to the great bankers of the world, perhaps our state department will be allowed to recognize that the people have overthrown the’ mon- archial system also on that side of the earth. Senator Root wants a law passed to enable governments like Russia and Mexico to follow and seize political refugees to the United States. Such a law is a logical demand in following out the policy which we have begun. Monarchy and special privilege are one. Their interests are identical. Their purposes are the same and should be forwarded by co-operative methods. The secret service of Russia and our immigration bureau should work hand in hand. Disturbers should be followed and apprehended. The enemies of privilege — whether kings or high finance-7- should be labeled ''anarchists” and hounded into jails The en- trance to our port should be more securely barred and carefully watched. And that old figure of a woman with a torch held aloft — it probably signifies the fires of anarchy and discontent — should be removed. It should be consigned to the dumping place for liberties forgot. Liberty sustains the same relationship to mind that space does to matter. The man who does not do his own thinking is a slave, and is a traitor to himself and to his felloW men. — Robert G, Ingersoll, MEDALS AND MEN. When a workingman in private employ has served long and faithfully, -the government of Saxony confers on him a silver medal in recognition of the years and toil he has contributed to The Religion of a Socialist. 45 the country's progress. Fine idea for the U. S., someone says. Let's see. John Petroski, American born, takes his place as a coal miner at the age of sixteen. When John is 21, still straight and strong^ he marries pretty Maria, Twenty years pass and John has done a quarter of a century's work, toiling from daybreak for 10, 12 and even 14 hours a day in the depth of a mine, emerging each night with begrimed body, deadened mind and unconscious that he has ever had a soul. In a house of two rooms exists John Petroski, aged 41, his wife Maria and seven children. Forty-one years of age, the be- ginning of manhood's prime, but John is stoop-shouldered, thin, staring blankly at the world, without love, without hope, without life enough even to complain. One night six miners bring home what is left of John on an improvised stretcher. Oh, just a slight accident, the superin- tendent tells the reporters. The mechanical and human machinery of the great mine wasn't stopped in its work for more than ten minutes. John's leg has to be cut off, so he's fired. The mine can't be expected to hire cripples. - John begins to murmur a little over the bitter poverty that faces him. This must be stopped at once. Brilliant Mea ! Get a government medal for him. He has served 25 years. That will prevent him from complaining of hunger and cold, and unin- spected machinery which made the ac(^ident possible will again escape attention. Fine idea. Wouldn't a service pension be more of a recognition than a medal? Wouldn't federal investigation and real federal enforce- ment of safe working conditions and adequate v^^ages be even better than a pension? You answer that. ‘‘WEALTHY WILL FACE HUNGRY MOBS ON THE STREETS.— Dr. Wiley. Washington, Feb. 13. — Prediction of a revolution by under- paid and underfed Americans is made here Tuesday by Dr. Har- vey W. W'iley, the government's food expert. “The time is rapidly approaching," said Dr. Wiley, “when 46 The Religion of a Socialist the wealthy will face mob violence on the streets. The situation will be due to the fast approaching day when working people will be deprived of means of subsistence. Every day the position of the workingman is becoming worse.’" Supplementing his statements regarding mob violence, Dr. Wiley said: ‘T thoroughly agree with Judge E. H. Gary that un- less something is done to alleviate the present conditions of un- rest in the nation mob rule is bound to come. The sentiment of unrest and abhorrence comes from over-capitalizing great indus- tries, the selling of watered stock, the promotion of worthless land schemes, the extortions of express, telephone and telegraph systems and dozens of other schemes^or deceiving and defraud- ing the people. The great vice of the country is its insane wor- ship of money. My plan for relief is not for mob violence to re- distribute wealth, but for education that wijl bring a state of mind forbidding the illegitimate accumulation of wealth and in- sure forever to this nation its fundamental principles of liberty, justice and equal opportunity.” SOCIALISM AND PATRIOTISM. In several places during the past few nionths, there have been wild outcries against desecration of the American flag which it is presumed that Socialists condone. Red flags have been torn down by the police in several places on the plea of outraged pa- triotism; and a great many New York newspapers protest against the utterances of Socialists that the red flag- is superior to the Stars and Stripes. This also is a moral question, and therefore a religious one. It involves the principle that the whole of humanil^^ is greater than any part of it. The American nation is- one na- tion including nearly 100,000,000 people. But there are other nations, including the total population of the globe, which is some 1,500,000,000. It surely will not be disputed that these 1,500,- 000,000 are more than the 100,000,000. Therefore the symbol of the nation is not greater than the symbol of the human race. The red flag is the symbol of the human race, adopted for that pur- pose and proclaimed to that end. It represents the red current 47 The Religion of a Socialist, of human blood which flows ip all veins alike. It is a proposition in mathematics, therefore, that the red flag is superior to the Stars and Stripes, because one represents the whole, the other represei^s only a part. This can be denied only by a denial that the red flag does represent the whole of humanity. There is no other flag, how- ever, that does. The •'only flag which at present officially flies above that of the United States is the church flag. Whenever a service is being held aboard any of our battleships at sea, the church flag, containing a white cross on a blue ground, is flown above the Stars and Stripes. ^ The nation thus officially recog- nized that the church which represents the religious principles of humanity, is, and of right ought to be, entitled to precede the nation. Now the red flag represents all humanity also, not only from an economic point of view, but from a moral point of view also. Therefore, our claim that it should fly above the national flag. Let us take a case 4n our own history. The civil war was turned on the question whether the states were superior to the nation or the nation to the states. It was finally decided that the nation is superior to any individual state. Surely it is not pos- sible to refrain from carrying our intelligence one step farther and saying that therefore all humanity is superior to any one nation. , ( When two nations conflict, the only way out in times past wasjor those two nations to go to war. But with the close knit- ting of the worjd together in the bond of modern industrial, it is clearly seen that a conflict between two nations injures all the rest. Therefore we have established international tribunals of arbitration. They hav^, it is true, not amounted to very much as yet, but the principle has been recognized. International in- terests are superior to those of any one nation. This principle is recognized as high and humane. But it is precisely the principle that the red flag stands for. Socialism recognizes national boundaries only as conveniences of admin- istration, just as we now recognize state lines. It is Highly prob- able that if the tension between England and Germany were to 48 The Religion of a Socialist. come to a head war would be prevented by the common agree- ment of the workmen of both nations to call a general strike un- til the foolishness of war was stopped. They would do this on the principle of the red flag ; that the workers, of two nations can have no interests that conflict. Such a general strike would be a thousand times more effective and powerful than resort to The Hague tribunal. It would be an enforcement, which could not be withstood, of the principle of international peace. For humanity i« one, and rises or falls together. This i^the fundamental proposition for which the. red flag also stands. The words of Jesus, 'T have come that ye might have life and might have it more abundantly,'' sums up precisely the teachings of the world movement for which we stand. Life more abundant, both material and spiritual ; bread, but also 4he y^ords proceeding out of the mouth of God, are what we as Christians stand for, and what as intelligent Socialists we should stand for, too. During this service, and during every service of our church, we pray ‘'God save the State." We offer prayers for the presi- dent and all others in authority, for the governor and occasionally for congress. They all need it. But now it is evident that if God is to save and protect a state it must be in accordance with God's will as that is known to us. To pray to save a state which is in direct defiance of God's will and purpose is sheer blasphemy. In order to make a prayer worth offering, therefore, it is necessary for us to bring the state into accordance with the will of God as we know it. What do we know of the nature of God, into harmony with which we may bring our nation in order that it may stand? The first thing about Him is that He is Creator. Whatever be our belief, we all admit that the world is here and that some- thing started it, and something keeps it going. The word “God" means primarily that which made and sustains the world. “Na' lure" is often used to express this conception. There is a dif- ficulty with this word, because nature cannot mean both that which is made and that which makes it. We must distinguish between the machinery and the power which made it and drives it, or hopeless confusion will result. The philosopher Spinoza 49 The Religion of a Socialist, started out as a pantheist. Nature was all. But he had to dis- tinguish between ‘'Natura Naturata’’ and '‘Natura Naturans”; that is, between nature making and nature made* This force behind nature, the creative life, is what we mean to start with when we say ''God.’' The nation must be brought into harmony with this life force or it will collapse. A house not built in ac- cordance with the law of gravitation will fall. A nation is simply organized life, and a nation built in defiance of the laws of the life force must likewise Ifall. Jesus proclaimed that God not only had created the world but was still creating it. "My Father worketh hitherto,” he said, "and I work.” That is to say, God keeps right on creating, there- fore the Son of God must also create. The men who create, therefore, are in harmony with God. A worker is a man who carries forward the process of 'creation. He takes what God has already done and carries it a little fur- ther. He is a producer; not strictly speaking a creator, because man’s labor always takes the material lying ready and fashions it into something more useful. The labor of man creates nothing, it only shapes. No laborer can work without materials, and these materials were made by the creative power which we call "God.” But a man who produces has a share in the creative work, and is therefore a son of God. On the other hand, a man who consumes and produces noth- ing, or who consumes more than he produces, is a destroyer and not a producer. He has taken sides with the enemies of God, not with His sons. He is a parasite, an excrescence, and a foe of the creative process. Therefore, a state to be in accord with the will of God must be built for the encouragement of the workers and not of the destroyers. If a man does nothing useful he should be regarded as an enemy of the state. If he lives solely upon the labor of others, he should be forcibly made to work. A state wherein this was true would have adopted the fundamental rule of the original Christian society : "If a man will not work, neither shall he eat.” Our nationals at present not built along these lines. The laws protect the man who has rather than the man who dp^§, They 50 The Religion of a Socialist. stand for the sacredness of capital rather than the holiness of labor. They avenge promptly and savagely any damage to prop- erty, but they smile and are lenient to any offense against human life. A house built upon the sand must fall. A nation built on such a system as this must go down. History shows it to us. Rome collapsed, Egypt collapsed, Assyria and Babylonia col- lapsed, when the right of property were exalted above those of life. So will the American nation collapse, and cannot but col- lapse, if it continues to put the rights of property above the rights of life. Therefore, any indication that the nation is changing its mind ab"Out this thing is an indication that the nation will be saved. And therefore, the tremendous increase in the Socialist vote at the last election means that the nation will live and not die. For that vote means that there are at least 1,000,000 men in this country who put life above property, humanity above gold. Surely it is evident that such men are the true patriots. Blind jingoism lands a people in disaster, just as incurable ego- tism lands a man in ceaseless trouble. Wise forethought seeks to establish a nation upon sure and firm foundations, so that it shall not fall. True patriotism recognizes that the nation is a part of humanity and is subordinate to the human race as a whole; true patriotism seeks to amend what is wrong, and to establish what is right, by the immutable laws of the universe itself. Our next president is a man of great knowledge and sin- gularly little wisdom. He is an academic sage, even if an eco- nomic ignoramus. Yet there is hope for the nation during his administration. He is capable of changing his mind even to his own disadvantage. He can learn. The platform on which he was elected is a laughable structure, but then there is nothing to prove that he has ever read it. If it were possible for single men to save the nation I should believe him to be capable of it. Again, man has a right to life. But land is necessary to the exercise of that right; therefore man has a right to the use of land, and it cannot become private property. He^ that owns the land is master of those who live upon it, and can force them to 51 The Religion of a Socialist. give him the product of their labor for the privilege of living. If I owned the entire earth, I could drive every human being into the briny deep. I could compel the multitude to serve me under the stroke of the lash, or crouch as minions at the foot of my throne. Moreover, the only basis of private property is the right that a man his to the ownership of his person, and his powers and faculties. An article belongs to me because I have made it. But if I have a right to the product of my labor I have, also, a right to the material upon wMch I expend my labor, and therefore a right to the land. If I have no right to the land, then I have no right to the ownership of my person and the product of my la- bor, for these rights are dependent on the right to the use of the land. LABORERS’ UNREST IS HEALTHY SIGN, SAYS IRON- MASTER. Educated Classes Should Welcome Movement to Change Con- ditions, Says Carnegie. London, Sept. 24. — In a signed statement today Andrew Car- negie said: “The present unrest of the working classes through- out the world is a healthy sign. The unequal distribution of wealth and contrast between the lives of the rich and poor passed unnoticed in early days and was therefore possible. “Today the spirit of democracy is abroad and will have its way. What we of the educated class have to do is to welcome such movements of the spirit and head and by regulated action change conditions. When such remedial change comes under the reign of law the beneficial effects will be felt by all classes, not least by the millionaire class. “The agitation for improved conditions amongst the masses is another symptom of a great underlying cause — the good things of the world are not justly divided. This does not mean that the drunken, worthless man is to receive the reward due to the hon- 52 The Religion of a Socialist. est, sober workman with his children school and a happy home his refuge. Far from it. Merit must always count. The duty of the educated leisured classes is to impress upon the working classes the vital necessities of order under law. Impress them with this truth, that they will gain their end much easier and sooner by adherence to the law than ihey can possibly do by its violation. Improvement under the reign of law should be the watchword.'' The only difference between a monarchy and a republic is that we do mot call our idle rich kings, dukes and princes. We pat ourselves on the back and think we have sidetracked the nobility and made wonderful progress, but we are only fooling ourselves/ We have planted the same seed and it must boar fruit. We may call it another name to make it palatable. We know in our hearts that our whole system is putrid and rotten to the core and that sooner or later we must face the inevitable when pa- tience ceases to be a virtue. Did I say must, then I am wrong, for the people have it in their hands to change it, namely So- cialism. No government has ever attenlpted to organize industry as a whole and bring it under control. If they had, governments would have lived and been permanent. The establishment of a minimum wage will assuredly lighten the burden of women, but will not abolish all economic injustice. Baltimore Girls Get Eight-Hour Day. Baltimore — An eight-hour day with the same pay as re- ceived for ten hours with wage increases over a certain standard has been secured by the Crown Cork and Seal Operatives' Local Union No. 14204. This organization is composed mostly of girls who are employed by the Crown Cork and Seal ComfTany. Be- cause there is no national union in this industry the union, is affiliated direct to the American Federation of Labor. The man- ner in which the business of this union is conducted, together with gains made, proves that women can organize and can im- prove working conditions, as well as men, without the interfer- The Religion of a Socialist. 5^ ence of weil-meaning outsiders, who advise girls in all manner of ways except urge them to organize and help themselves. A. F. of L. Organizer Eichelberger assisted the girls in nego- tiating their new wage scale, and this trade union says : 'The union was formed about four years ago, the present agreement being the second made with the company. "The first agreement amounted in the aggregate, to about $52,000 per year increase in wages; the one just obtained amounts to about $49,000 per annum. So in a little over four years the American Federation of Labor has procured over $257,- 000 for these girls. Does womem's organization pay? What other set of working girls in Baltimore have the eight-hour day?"’ "After Us, the Deluge.” It appears that the rich men of the country never will learn sense. About seventeen years ago, Mrs. Bradley Martin gave a ball, costing; approximately $100,000. Times were hard then. Only a short time before Coxey's armies were marching to Wash- ington to present a petition to congress with "booth on.” The Bradley Martin ball fanned the flames of discontent. It was too much of a contrast with the soup houses then maintained by nearly every city in the country. Shortly thereafter occurred the famous "Seeley dinner,” when "Little Egypt,” or her understudy, emerged from a huge pie and did the muscle dance in the nude, or nearly so. About the same time John Wanamaker's son gave a twenty thousand dollar dinner to twenty guests in Paris. The storm broke, and these extravagances were denounced from pulpit and press and Socialism began its great forward movement in the United States. Nine years ago, James Hazen Hyde gave his dinner in New York which resulted in the com- plete reorganization of three of the great insurance companies of the country and the writing of "Frenzied Finance” by Tom Lawson. ^ The latest foolishness on the part of the rich is a banquet by the packer^ to be given on the night of September 22, at the Congress hoteUin Chicago, at a cost of $150,000. According to 54 The Religion of a Socialist program, when the guests arrive, they will find ‘Teacock alley,” the promenade for the society folk, converted jnto an English lane fringed with fields of grain, through which will run rabbits and wild fowl. Through the lane the guests will be led into a dining room where tables will be laid in a grove flanked by rose bushes in full bloom and a forest of trees. Around the room will be wire screening, back of which will be several live foxes which will be hunted to death by a troop of western horsemen with a pack of fox hounds. Cabaret perform- ers, garbed as hunters and huntresses, will celebrate the end of the chase by singing old English hunting songs. The banqueters are rich men, able to pay for it all, but the country will imagine it knows where responsibility for much of the high price of beef rests, and there will be dissatisfaction and more Socialists.’ It is a strange thing that the very rich never seem able to read the handwriting on the wall. They seem to have no inkling of the trend of things. They seem content to say with those French nobles prior to the revolution, ‘‘After us, the deluge.” Typical of the slaves that lived under fear of the Dragon Su- perstition were the wretched creatures that threw themselves in hundreds under the wheels of the car of Juggernaut, and the wretched creatures sacrificed on the altar of the dreadful gods in Old Mexico, and the miserable Africans put to death in cruel torture by some rain doctor who said they were responsible for the lack of rain. Horrible torture has been inflicted upon man by his fellow man, in the name of the dragon of superstitution. Thousands have been burned alive, torn on the rack, tortured with the thumbscrew — devilish and fiendish have been the cruelties in- vented in the name of superstition, and applied by the ingenuity of those that made their living as agents of superstition. Take your courts, for instance. What are they but machines organized for the people, to obey the people. What are the judges but the paid servants of the people, hired, well paid and well treated to administer justice. Why should they not be well treated while they treat the people well? Why should they not The Religion of a Socialist. 55 be looked upon with great respect, as long, and only as long, as they are in a large sense respectable? Yet, is there not a superistition about the courts, a foolish dread of the unlimited power of Mr. Jones who has been taken from a corporation office and put on the bench? Do not people need to get rid of that nonsense, and kill that foolish superstition T When Superstition Dies, Wealth and Happiness Increase. When men stop fearing that which does not exist, their minds set free, work better, produce more and get more. A superstitious person is poor and ignorant always. We are taught to believe implicitly in the superstition that the money of the people, including the credit of government, should be used chiefly to increase the wealth of bankers and financiers. You see the biggest city in the United States, New York, humbly submissive through its officials to the proposition that only one man can supply the money that the city needs — whereas in reality that man has not, all together, as much money as the citizens pay in taxes in any one single year. We have the bankers throughout the country holding on deposit the money of the nation — which belongs to the people — and lending it out to farmers and to business men at usurious rates, or refusing to lend it at all when they happen to get fright- ened about conditions. Knowledge the Asset of a Nation. A government is an individual made up of individual units and its position in the world of nations is determined by its knowledge, not by the number of individuals, therefore, the fundamental asset of a nation is knowledge. This being true, the first purpose of any nation should be to acquire knowledge to this end, and the child from its birth should be considered an asset of the nation, and placed under its fostering care during its de- velopment, and as the education of the child is for usefulness in the field of industry and administration of government, there should be no break between these departments. The system should 56 The Religion of a SocialisJL be a sequence of steps by which the individual rises from one plane of intelligence to another throughout his life, thus would a nation subserve the greatest of all interests — the intellectual advancement of the nation as a nation and provide the means whereby each individual would have the opportunity to acquire knowledge, advance to industry and finally to the direction of government by systematic progression. Under this system there would be no break in the progress of the individual; he would be an intellectual asset to be encouraged and assisted m ev^ry way by the nation if only one in a thousand so educated should prove to be an Edison. Fewer Marriages Because People Think. New York Conservation Commissioner E. E. Rittenhouse, formerly of Denver, asks, ‘‘Why are there more than 17,000,000 unmarried women in the United States? “Never,’’ he says, “has a nation been so prosperous or so within reach of the luxuries of life. Yet people do not marry. There is something wrong. What is it?” There are many reasons why people do not marry. One is the high cost of living, for while the nation is undoubtedly pros- perous, the golden stream does not wash by every man’s door to an extent that enables him to support a family in any decent comfort. The main reason, however, that there has been what Mr. Wegg called a decliil^ and fall off in matrimony is because peo- ple have begun to use their heads instead of their hearts in de- ciding the matter. Cold logic has superseded the mating in- stinct in dealing with the problem. In former times men and women married simply because they were attracted to some member of the opposite sex. Whether they could feed or clothe a family, or whether they were likly to bequeath some terrible inheritance to their offspring, did not enter into their calculation. They went it blind without regard to consequences to themselves or any one else. Now intelligent men and women consider before marriage whether they have a right to marry and bring into the world deformed and deseased The Religion of a Socialist, S'? children, or children that they will have to sell into child slavery becau"fee of poverty. Also men and women are becoming afraid to marry. They see that nine-tenths ^ of the marriages in the world are failures, so far as bringing any happiness to either husband or wife, and so they decide that single blessedness is better than double wretchedness. Only a few days ago a brilliant young physician, who has already achieved success, safd to me that nothing on earth, after what he had seen of matrimonial misery through the practice of his profession, could ever induce him to marry. He recognized that the ideal marriage was the happiest lot on earth, but the chances against it were too great. He was playing no hundred- to-one shot at happiness. As a rule the income which a young man earns, while pos- sibly sufficient to secure a fair degree of comfort for himself, does not suffice for funding a family. I want to tell you right now that a man who had thirty dol- lars a week and a wife and six children to support here in New York, unless he went into a tenement and dressed in a suit of black paint and lived on breakfast food advertisements, walked to and from his work in bare feet (carrying hose and shoes in his hand to save shoe leather and married a red-headed girl to save coal bills) would have a hard job to live, with food and rent at their present prices. It's that dread of the future, the terrible uncertainties of life under our present social system — no man knowing unless he is a government employe when his job will be taken from him and knowing that the older he gets and the more he adds to his family and expenses, the greater the risk he is running — that makes a man pause and. think. The m.an who is on a salary, is ever drawing nearer to that day when his boss will say: “Hello, Jones; I notice you're gettiffg bald headed; lots of gray hairs, too; got a family, too, I suppose, and I guess there is not quite enough money left over f-rom your salary to feed you well enough to keep your strength and vitality up to that point where you can give me as much work as I could get out of a younger man. Let me see, you have been with me twenty years ; 58 The Religion of a Socialist. you are now fOrty-six years old, I believe, and drawing twenty* five dollars a week. Well, you leave Saturday. I'll put a younger man in your place at fifteen dollars per and that will save me five hundred dollars a year, and I'll get more work out of the younger man than I can out of you." Then Jones goes home, spends six months trying to get another job, and finding he can't get anything to do and that his savings are exhausted jumps off the dock, gets under a street car, or puts a bullet through his brain. What happens to Jones' family, when he is gone? Don't inquire too closely, it might break your heart. If you knew all that Mrs. Jones had to go through when the bread winner was gone, you'd be sorry for Mrs. Jones. Why didn't Jones save some money, you'll ask. He did, i)ut six months without work used it all up. Cupid in these days is having his troubles. Those who rush blindly into marriage are generally the thoughtless and ignorant half-grown boys who cannot earn enough to support themselves. The man who has education and a conscience, linked with a small salary (and there are tens of thousands of such men) sits down and calmly figures out what he can do with his fifteen to eighteen dollars a week. He can't say that in two or three years I'll be getting more money. Of course he ought to be able to say that, but the chances of promotion in the business world today are for the mass of men very slight. The rule is to starve a man on a salary that he can merely exist on, and let him work gradually up to a salary on which he can live with a fair amount of comfort, but not a salary on which two or six or eight can live. The business man reckons today that certain posi- tions are worth so much and no more. When an employe gets dissatisfied because he can't get more, he is allowed to go, and by the time he is getting a salary on which he can live with fair comfort he is way into the thirties and nearing the danger zone. When I tell you that the last census showed that the wage earners of the United States produce yearly more than two thousand dol- lars' worth of marketable product per head and only receive back a quarter of that sum in wages, you may know that higher wages could be paid, and if the law set a minimum wage for men and women, they would be paid and paid mighty quick. ThoSe firm^ 59 The Religion of a Socialist that couldn't pay living wages would and should go out of busi- ness. That matter has been thoroughly thrashed out and settled in Australia and New Zealand. Every employe today is regarded as in investment, and the one great object of business is to make every investment produce the last possible cent in dividends. Do you get that? We are foolishly told that the merchant princes in our big cities cannot raise wages, at least one of them cannot unless they all do, because the man who raised wages without the others doing the same, would be at a great disadvantage, as all the other men would be able to undersell him. Now that is one of the meanest little lies or rather one of the meanest big lies that was ever foisted on an ignorant and exploited public, and lying newspapers take up that falsehood and ram it down the people's throats, because each of the big merchant princes spends a thousand dollars a day throughout the year, Sundays .included (and that's $365,000 a year, remember), for a daily page of ad- vertising, in the big metropolitan news sheets. Men receiving this enormous sum for advertising, which alone makes it possible for them to do business, are not going to fight for higher wages and incur the enmity and lose the patronage of the big adver- tisers. A newspaper that is getting that amount of advertising from a merchant will naturally defend him and his class, even though he is sending every girl in his employ straight to the devil, and ninety per cent of you who read this would do the same thing and you know it. It's a vicious circle and you'd get in that circle if the chance ever came your way. There is a merchant in New York who pays higher wages than any of the other stores, and who charges no more for his goods and who, in fact, sells better goods than his competitors. People flock to this man's store because he has adopted a live and let live policy, and he has adopted it because he is a man of principle and honor, a true Christian who believes in the golden rule and lives up to it. All the other stores could do as he does, but they are too contemptibly mean to do it, and as long as they can get girls to work for next to nothing a week, even though they know what is the conse- quence of paying them the salaries they do, they are going to continue doing it, and the cowardly press is afraid to raise Its 60 The Religion of d^Socialist voice in protest. When the Illinois Vice Commission was in ses- sion out in Chicago, the most horrible facts that came to light were never reported, and paid agents of the big business houses filled the papers with letters supposedly written by white slave victims, stating that low wages had nothing to do with their going wrong. Now that is a positive fact known to those who know anything at all. But remember, half the news never gets into print. Wealth is all powerful and can open and close mouths just as it wishes. There is a conspiracy of silence, and if you were to take an article to the big magazines in New York, telling anything for instance detrimental to the meat industry, although that article of yours was full of facts that the public is crazy to know, there are only one or two publications (and those insignifi- cant ones) that would print your article. So the man who is figuring on getting married, crumples up the piece of paper on which he has figured, sticks the pencil in his ^pocket, heaves a sigh of regret, pushes the vision of the home with the girl of his heart aside, and sneaks off to his little hall bedroom, lights his pipe (which is now his wife and comforter) with trust tobacco, tobacco that used to be sold by independent merchants who have been pushed out of business, and writes a letter to his best girl, who is probably getting six dollars a week in one of the big stores, and tells her it’s all off. She, with no other prospect than ‘‘six” a week in front of her, takes the first automobile ride that is of- fered, has a late supper with wine on the side with the gentle- man who owns the car, and you can guess the rest. If all men and women workers in every line of effort were organized just as dollars are organized, there would be fe^er bachelors and little need of taxing them. I am glad you believe in woman suffrage. If you had said you didn’t, I’d have sent the Goat all the way to Texas to have butted some sense into you. It is greed and selfishness that cause the care and worry that now weighs down the human race and make life a tortue and a hell for millions of people. The heaviest burdens are placed on the weakest backs, that is why women suffer so much and perish long ere their prime, and that is why two million little children are'wearing out their poor little lives in the industrial 61 The Religion of a Socialist. infernos of this tremendously wealthy land. Those who do the heaviest duties and most dangerous work get the least pay, \vhile those who do nothing or next to nothing, gather in all that makes life worth while. Instead of lightening the burdens of humanity, organized wealth forces masses to accept the lowest possible wage in payment for the things they create, and then makes they pay exorbitant prices for the articles their toil and skill have brought into existence. Thus are the workers squeezed going and coming, thus are their burdens added to and their faces ground between the upper millstones of low wages and the lower millstone of high prices. This is the despotism of dollars, the cruel and heartless system that places the burden on those least able to bear them, upon weak women, sickly children and underfed, poorly nour- ished men, and the men responsible for these conditions are called good Christian men, and some of them attend church on Sunday. They worship Mammon feverishly and frantically six days a week, and God profunctorily for an hour on the Sabbath. We must not, however, wonder at the frailty and shortcomings of human nature when we consider what we have come up from, and what we were in the last wild savage brutal blood-thirsty and murderous age. It is marvelous, considering the tens of thou- sands of years of barbarism that still exists within us that we do as well as we do. Remember, that we are still but mere human microbes^ groping in the dark, clinging to this little ball of earth as a fly clings to the driving wheel of a great engine hurtling madly through limitless space surrounded by cosmic wonders. Millions of other worlds in the making and unmaking all about us is planetary systems infinitely greater than our own and all con- trolled by one supreme mind that lights the evening stars, paints the wayside flower, sends the sunshine and the rain, the seed time and the harvest, and who is slowly putting into our hearts and minds, slowly because we are too weak, too brutal, too selfish to absorb God’s ideas faster than we do; the desire to be better and do better, the de&ire to be less animal and be more like the One who taught us to love our neighbors like ourselves, to do unto others as we would have others do unto us, and who said it was easier for a rich man to go through-the eye of a needle than to 62 The Religion of a Socialist, enter the kingdom of heaven, and who promised that the meek should inherit the earth. Follow in His footsteps and we have love ruling the earth, the love that makes us bear one another's burdens, that sends the factory waif into the fields to play, the female millworker to her home and children, and gives the pallid consumptive sweatshop workers good pay, reasonable hours of toil and a sanitary environment. Here is the love that humanity craves, the love that not only lifts but abolishes all burdens, drives the hog and the devil out of man, makes all humankind brothers and leaves the race refined, purified, inspired and deified. Slowly but surely we are learning the lesson that Christ taught us, learn- ing to take care off the shoulders of others, learning to become less swinish and more Godlike. It is a long, tedious struggle and millions will go down to death and be crushed by the heel of greed, power and might, ere love finally conquers, but love will conquer in the end and is conquering daily, for God has willed it and God is love. World’s Production of Staple Crops. That the annual increase in the world's production of the staple crops has been two and one-half times faster than the growth of population throughout the civilized world is the con- clusion reached in a report prepared by Nat C. Murray of the Crop Reporting Board, Department of Agricuuture. Mr. Murray figures that the rate of increase in products in ten years from 1895-99 to 1905-09 was 25 per cent, or an average of 2^/^ per cent a year, whereas the population of the civilized world, including China, increased at the rate of about one per cent a year. The world's production of five cereals comprising the people's main breadstuff, in the period of 1895-99 averaged 533,000,000,000 pounds; in the following five-year period it averaged 594,000,- 000,000 pounds ; in 1905-09 to 666,000,000,000. Animal products, according to this inquiry have increased greatly within the past decade in proportion to numbers of live stock from twenty-six countries outside of the United States. Available figures r>how that the aggregate of supply of animal products, as in the case of crop production, has kept pace with the population during the past decade. The conclusion is that recent advances in the cost The Religion of a Socialist , 63 of living are not due to scarcity or lessening of agricultural products . — Bradstreet s, ^ The Curse of War. Would it not be a strange sight to see a banker, bishop, a railway president, a coal baron and anti-labor injunction judge, a U. S. senator all hanging on stakes on a pit with scores of other men piled on top of them, all cursing, screaming, groaning, bleed- ing and dying, following the flag? No, you won't find them there, and there is a reason. I will explain : Friend, don't curse the militiamen and soldiers. No, they are our brothers. Listen, oh, listen, you poor betrayed workers. If the masters want blood, let them cut their own throats. Let those who want victories go to the firing line and get them. What is war? They say ‘‘War is Hell." Well, let those who want hell go to hell. President William H. Taft, as secretary of war, and immediately following war, has said veneral diseases were again by far the most im- portant diseases affecting the efficiency of the army during the year. Our annual national expense of militarism, $450,000,000, would pay the annual college expenses of 1,800,000 young men and women. Mother, is your five-year-old boy strong, healthy and handsome? “Yes." Well, that is fine, but think of him at the age of twenty in slaughtering clothes, tricked into the army. You see, mother, in a war some mothers' boys must be butchered, and for $13 a month your boy can go to war, lose a leg and when he comes home, if he comes at all, it will cost him, say, $100 to buy a wooden leg and he perhaps won't have the price. :.Let the planet Earth never again be cursed with this heart- less and cruel profit system, where the father is quarreling with the mother, where the sisters can't trust their brothers, where the members of the family are scattered to the foud winds, and the daughters of the land seek refuge in houses of prostitution, while the flower of manhood dies on the battlefield for the greed of gold. Tomorrow if war w^re declared between the United States and any great foreign nation, millions of men would offer their services and sacrifice fortunes and lives. Why should not this 64 The Religion of a Socialist. spirit prevail should the people call for these men for the pur- pose of building a new industrial machine? The first would mean war, destruction and the loss of life; the second would mean peace, construction and the birth of a new civilization. One would destroy, the other would build ; one would cost as much as the other and in either case the people would have to paj^ the price. WHAT IS WAR? War Is: For working class homes — emptiness. For working class wives — heartaches. For working class mothers — loneliness. For working class children — orphanage. For working class sweethearts — agony. For peace — defeat; For death — a harvest. For buzzards — a banquet. For the grave — victory. For worms — a feast. For nations — debts. For justice — nothing. For 'Thou shalt not kilF' — boisterous laughter. For "Put up thy sword'' — a sn^r. For Christ — contempt. For bankers— bonds, interest. For big manufacturers — business profits. For preachers on both sides — ferocious prayers for victory. For leading business men, leading politicians, leading edu- cators, leading preachers, leading editors, leading lecturers — for all these windy patriots who talk bravely of war — never positions as privates in the army, up close where they are likely to get their delicately perfumed flesh torn to pieces. Pennsylvania’s Human Scrap-pile. Pennsylvania is reaping the harvest of child labor and reck- less exploitations of adult labor. Children of the mill and mine who are taken at tender age, squeezed dry and thrown upon the 65 The Religion of a Socialist. industrial scrap heap, have been piling up for years. The maimed and broken workmen of the coal and steel trust have been piling up for years. Pennsylvania now has over 7,000,000 inhabitants and 600,000 persons in the state receive public charity — one in twelve in Pennsylvania. The Cradle of Protection. Says Labor Is Denied Full Toil Product. Kansas City, Aug. 28. — ‘We find the basic cause of indus- trial dissatisfaction to be low wages. Or, stated in another way, the fact that the workers of the nation, through compulsory and oppressive methods, legal and illegal, are denied the full product of their toil.'^ This sums up the report to congress given out today by Chairman Frank Walsh, of the now extinct federal industrial relations commission. It comprises the personal findings of Walsh and is signed by Commissioners Lennan, O'Connell and Garretson. The report denounces big employers of great wealth who re- fuse to permit unionization of their employes, and “who pay small wages to bread winners of families, while they enjoy plenty, although they never even visit their shops." It makes the declaration that “unrest among the workers in industry has grown to proportions that already menace the social good will and peace of the nation." The report scores the employment of state militia in strike situations, declaring that this method “has bred a bitter hos- tility to the militia system among members of labor organiza- tions, and states have been unable to enlist wage earners for this second line of the nation's defense. It declares employers from coast to coast have created and maintained small private armies of armed men to suppress striking employes by deporting, im- prisoning, assaulting and killing their leaders." The employer spy system is declared to be one of the great- est fomenters of suspicion and distrust among workers of their employers. Courts, legislatures and governors, the report charges, have been rightfully accused of serving the employers to defeat justice and pervert the institutions of the country. 66 The Religion of a Socialist. ‘'Citizens numbering millions,” says the report, “smart un- der a sense of injustice and oppression. “We find the unrest described to be but the latest manifesta- tion of the age-long struggle of the race for freedom of oppor- tunity for every individual to live his life to its highest ends. As the nobles of England wrung their independence from King John, and as the tradesmen of France broke through the ring of privilege enclosing the three estates, so today the millions who serve society in arduous labor on the highways, aloft on scaf- foldings, and by the sides of whirling machines, are demanding that they, too, and their children, shall enjoy all of the blessings that justify and make beautiful this life. “And while vast inherited fortunes, representing zero in social service to the credit of their possessors, automatically treble in volume, two-thirds of those who toil from eight to twelve hours a day receive less than enough to support themselves and their families in decency and comfort. From cradle to the grave they live in shadow of the fear that their only resource — their opportunity to toil — shall be taken away from them through sick- ness, caprice of a foreman, or the fortunes of industry.” NOT ONE CHANCE IN TWENTY. Governor Ferguson of Texas told the Industrial Relations Commission on March 16 that the tenant farmers in Texas have not one chance in fifty of becoming a home owner. And still the cry is raised by the unthinking — “Back to the Land!” “We have, according to the income tax returns, 44 families, with incomes of $1,000,000 or more, whose members perform lit- tle or no useful service, but whose aggregate income, totaling at least fifty millions per year, are equivalent to the earnings of 100,000 wage earners, at the average rate of $500 per year.” — Rrom Press Abstract of Report of United States Commission on Industrial Relations. For in the brain of the lowest of our ancestors there was the spark of CO-OPERATION. And the modern city of today and all great material achievements are the result of co-operation — one man helping and working with his fellows, applied the spark 67 • The Religion of a Socialist of co-operation that built the city upon which he gazes, do not forget that co-operation has only begun its work. Men today, after their fashion, are still isolated cave dwellers. Go out to the valley where the coal mine comes up from the ground in a black, grimy building. You will see scattered along the side of that valley houses in which men and women live not much more happily than those that watched the mammoth go by. And those that live in somewhat greater comfort in the cities, in flats and tenements, are cave dwellers in THEIR way. They also watch the mammoth go by, and, isolated, can do nothing. Great wealth, like the mammoth, walks up and down the land, with a power that none can challenge. Monopoly is the mammoth, and the people are as helpless against it today as those old cave men, before they combined, were helpless against the hairy mammoth, in their valley. Men have combined to build pyramids, and combined more wisely to build schools and great buildings. They have not yet combined to control and own that which is really important in the world. As separate, grimy, suffering individuals, they dig the coal and haul it to the surface. Then the mammoth of superior in- telligence takes it from them, gives them barely enough to live, and squanders the millions of unearned and undeserved profits. The workers and producers on the farm struggle, and the consumers in the cities struggle. And they have* not learned by co-operation to work together, to kill the mammoth of selfishness that preys upon them. The workers in the great shops have not learned the lesson of co-operation. They endure in sullen silence conditions that they consider unjust. And then they strike, tens of thousands of them. And they hurt themselves and eacl> other more than they hurt anybody else. They go hungry, and, by and by, they go back and work again. They think that what they do is co-oper- ation. It is only MOB STRUGGLE. There was more real co-operation, considering the times and 68 The Religion of a Socialist. the limited knowledge, among the old cave men that killed the mammoth than among the so-called intelligent citizens of a mod- ern republic. We have our chance to co-operate at the ballot box — we don't use it. We walk up to that box, in separate, fighting crowds. But, at least, we can read and talk to each other, and we know WHAT CO-OPERATION COULD DO IF WE WOULD USE IT. Compare real civilization, real civic intelligence, real co-oper- ation. We are as backward and savage as the man in this pic- ture compared with the city upon which he fixes his dull gaze. But, time is long, there is plenty of it ahead. We do learn, we do think, we do, in our dull, feeble way, co-operate, as did the killers of the mammoth. And, eventually, the mammoth of our day will be conquered and vanish as did the old hairy monster- then we shall pass on to some other great problem. For problems will never end, and improvement will never end, and the human race will never stop in its upward march until this planet shall grow old and grow cold, and we shall all move on to another, better, bigger one, and begin all over again. Progress, effort, struggle, achievement, forever and ever throughout a univefse that has no end, on suns and planets in- finite in number — and we immortal. It is an exciting program, well worth while. But for a whole people to find itself unable to get justice, for ninety per cent of the population to realize that the courts are not for the poor — is not that as bad as the old-fashioned nonsense ? Isn't it time for the people to get rid of the superstition that has carefully been planted in them by lawyers, for the sake of lawyers, and time to demand that justice shall be made simple, and judges businesslike? It will be a better country when we get rid of that particular foolish superstition to the effect that the laws should be con- trolled, made and shaped by lawyers, for lawyers, on a basis that puts justice beyond the reach of a majority, and UTTERLY BE- YOND THE REACH OF THE POOR, and that makes one hired 69 The Religion of a Socialist citizen on the bench insolently conscious of superiority to others. We allow our lawyers to monopolize and regulate justice for their own benefit. If there are atheists and infidels in the Socialist party, it is not the fault of Socialsm. They have as much right to mem- bership there as in any of the other political parties under a free government. As all class struggles necessarily are political wars to gain titles of ownership, the working class must take political action to invest in itself the titles to the property its labor produces and the Socialist party is the agency to do it. A state legisla- ture whose membership was composed of two-thirds of revolu- tionary workingmen could repeal, with the governor's help, the laws that give authority to corporations to keep private armies for the purpose of bulldozing dissatisfied employes. Should the courts attempt to set aside the acts of the legislature it could try, impeach and remove the judges. If it were necessary the governor could call the legislature to meet in special session to take this action to protect the welfare of the working class. It could make the killing of working people in industrial and com- mercial plants and in mines and on railroads and in marine trans- portation murder — a capital offense punishable .by death or im- prisonment for life. A mayor of a city, in which he is commander-in-chief of the police, could use them to arrest strike-breakers as suspicious characters whose presence and actions would be likely to create disorder, foment trouble and incite to riot, thereby endangering the lives of the working class citizens, and their labor-power, which they sell to the job owners for wages. A governor of a state is the commander-in-chief of its mil- itary forces. By political action the Socialist party, or in other words, class conscious working people, can by their votes elect a revolutionary workingman governor, and as governor he can use the state militia to force associations like the Business Men's Alliance and the Merchants' and Manufacturers' Associations to leave unmolested the officers and members of labor organizations. 70 The Religion of a Socialist SOCIAL SCIENCE ABLE TO PREVENT THE DESTRUCTION OF CIVILIZATION. Physical science has found a way to prolong human life. Social science has found a way to prolong the social life. Social science has the only remedy. How did you get it? , By searching, the records of history. Babylon, Greece, Rome and China were high up in civiliza- tion; they went to destruction. Why? Because the few controlled the many. Why do we close windows and doors when there is a bad electrical storm outside? Because experience has taught us that lightning is drawn in drafts. Social science has learned through historical experience that civilization will fall wherever the few control the many. Now what is the remedy? Experience is always the best teacher. As a precaution against lightning, abolish the draft. Against the destruction of civilization abolish the control of the many by the few. Then what? Establish thje will of all the people, which is SOCIAL DEMOCRACY. Unproductive labor is supported by productive labor. One man is engaged in making shoes, another in making clothes. A merchant buys" the shoes from the former at seventy-five per cent and sells them to the latter at one hundred per cent, and vice versa. These two men are supporting the merchant. In our pres- ent industrial system every producer is supporting nineteen para- sites. Abolish the system and the producer will get the full value for his labor. Read much; the Mind, which never can be still. If not intent on Good, is prone to ill. And where bright thoughts or Reasoning just you find. Repose them carefully in your inmost mind. — Benjamin Franklin. 71 The Religion of a Socialist, Socialism, as we teach it in America, is simply the substitu- tion of the co-operative for the competitive system. We pro- pose to make the government the sole capitalist, the agent of the people, to manage the industrial system for the benefit of all. American Socialism does not propose to interfere with the home, family or religion. It does not propose to interfere with private propei;;ty, or to make a new distribution of the national wealth. It simply intends that the government shall buy the means of production and transportation from private individuals and oper- ate these for the benefit of the people at large. Under Socialism there would be no tramps. A large num- ber of people are tramps because they cannot get work. A vast number cannot get work that they are able to perform. Some were clerks, or bookkeepers, or mechanics, and, having lost their positions, are unable to perform the hard labor of the railroad section hand. Some are tramps because they were discouraged by long hours of laborious toil, with insufficient remuneration. Some have i)ecome hardened by the a,sperities of the world. Some few are dishonest, but the public is not aware of the fact, and gives them a support. Some were born tired, because their mothers labored "ike galley slaves during gestation, and the un- born foetus has been impregnated with ennui and lassitude, and comes into the world cursed with physical debility. Under So- cialism, the working day would be reduced to two hours, and there would be labor for all, with a just compensation, and your tramps would disappear from the nation. Socialism will give every man an opportunity. It will make all men free* and equal. Under it there will be no privileged class, and this is why it has been so obstinately opposed. The capitalists say that under Socialism our powers of pro- ductivity would be multiplied twenty-fold, and that we would have too much, and that would be worse than starving. If men are not constantly employed, they will become inert and slothful, and civilization will retrograde. These people presume that man is actuated solely by corporal desires, and forget the existence of the human mind. 72 The Religion of a Socialist « It cannot be that all the years of toil and care and grief We live, shall find no recompense but tears. No sweet return that earth can give That all that leads us to aspire and struggle onward to achieve With even unattained desire Was given only to deceive. Republicans are not interested in ideas, but in offices. That is the plain truth about the rascals. And the worst feature is that the scamps want the offices in order to draw the salaries. Now we Democrats are also very fond of pie, but our purpose is to save the country. We feel that we can be of more benefit to the people if we have a good office where we can devote our entire time to them. Of course, we want the salaries too, but our purpose is to earn a living while we are doipg good. An out- sider might not see the difference, but it is very plain. The Re- publicans want the offices just for the pay, while we Democrats want the pay only because it is necessary for us to have some- thing with which to pay our bills while we are laboring unsel- fishly for the welfare of that class known as ‘The people.’" The battle against the political boss is a good battle. Let it go on until this species of boss is eliminated. But how about getting rid of the boss in industry? Is he really needed, or could we not do without him by co-operative organization of in- dustries? That is the latest ideal. “Call no man your master,” was said some 2,000 years ago, but mastery continued ever since. Suppose the government should buy out the trusts, as Mr. Ameringer suggested at the City Club the other day, the con- sumers might be benefited. But the industries thus made pub- lic ^property would be run on the boss system. The workers in them would be in about the same position as they afe now. Strikes among government “servants” show the need of getting rid of the boss system everywhere. Let the workers choose their own fore- men and leaders, using the recall when they become tryannous. That is the solution of the problem. We still bow down to the theory, that a few people have the right to own streets and gas companies, and turn into hundreds of millions for themselves the necessities of millions of indi- viduals— that idea needs to be killed off, 73 The Religion of a Socialist, On, my fair country! land of my nativity! I love thee! I love thy mountains and thy hills, thy meadows and thy groves. I love thy brooks and rills, and lakes and bays, and seas and streams! I love the pioneers who brought the blessings of civ- ilization to the wilderness. I love the heroes who bore the starry banner from Bunker Hill till it waved in triumph above the flag of the Briton from the walls of Yorktown. I love the patriots who consecrated the temple of freedom and enthroned the goddess of liberty in the halls of the nation. I go back in fancy’s flight to the early days of our history. I visit the mausoleums, where sleep the bones of the valiant dead. I summon the shades of the silent heroes from the dust of ages. I conjure the spirits of Washington and Jefferson to arise from their somber tombs and breathe upon the ebbing life of the nation and restore it to the bloom of health, that sons of freedom may be born to protect the rising generation from the thralldom of capitalism. Socialism does not advocate violent methods. We advocate the gradual absorption of industries by the government. Social- ism will be inaugurated by the municipal ownership of light, water, and street railways. The government will then acquire one of the many lines of the railroads of the nation. If these attempts are successful, another railroad will be nationalized, and finally the government will have complete control of its trans- portation. Every movement in this direction will be an object lesson, and will finally culminate in national collectivism. If the railroads, for instance, should refuse to sell, the government will build rival roads, and the immense profits now accruing to the stockholders will be used in the reduction of rates and the in- crease of wages, and thus the private roads will pass out of ex- istence. There is no injustice in this action, for if the roads now operated by private companies can not compete with the na- tional roads, according to the competitive system, they should succumb. Freedom Was the Beginning of All Civilization. But this freedom has been carried on under a system of prof- iting one man upon another, which has created a land-owning and 74 The Religion of a Socialist. tool-owning aristocracy. When the rich aristocracy can no longer make profits they will use the power of their stolen wealth to turn the human race back into slavery or a long lasting chaos will destroy all civilization, turning the race back into barbarism. International capital is in conspiracy to establish a new system of international slavery. In the long struggle of the pioneers to subjugate the arid deserts to reveal the hidden stores of wealth, poverty has often arisen and the battle with it has been long and fierce, but our poverty problem is not like that. It is poverty, not in an arid desert, but a garden of plenty. Wild beasts and savage Indians no longer threaten this new home, but a horde of far more crafty foes hover near — the idle, useless ruling class that live and prey on labor's back. The Workingman’s Answer to the Capitalist Class. We have fed you all for a thousand years and you hail us yet unfed. There is not a dollar of all your wealth but marks the workers dead. We have yielded our best to give you rest. You lie on crimson wool. If blood be the price of all your wealth, good God, we have paid it in full. There is not a mine blown skyward now but we are buried for you. There is not a wreck that drifts shoreward now but we are its ghastly crew. Go, reckon our dead by the forges red, and factories where we spin. If blood be the price of all your wealth, good God, we have paid for it. We have fed you for a thousand years, but that v/as our doom. You know, from the time you chained us in the fields to the strike of a week ago you have eaten our lives, our babies and wives, but that was your legal share, but if blood be the price of your legal wealth, good God, we have bought it fair . — Rudyard Kipling. Backing Their Union. American college and university professors may hold clear views about the unwholesomeness of the unionism of the Amer- ican working class men, but they see just as clearly that the unionism of the college and university professors is exactly what 75 The Religion of a Socialist is needed. University professors have been hoeing in a rather hard row recently, and the outlook for their future is anything but bright from the standpoint of their unionism. They have been getting ''canned'' right and left all over the country lately, and if their union is to be saved from wreckage they realize they must do something. They have been talking, but apparently the more they talk the more they get themselves into trouble. A committee of the American Association of University Pro- fessors has just reported on an inquiry into the wholesale dis- missal of members of the faculty at the University of Utah^ The report says that three of the four reasons given by the president of the university are illegal, and the fourth is untrue, or, in the language of the committee, "has no basis in fact." This is the cultural way of getting service from a substitute for the shorter and uglier word. The report says there was no reason for the dismissal of four professors, and hands out some hot criticism of the conduct of the university, the government of which, the report says, "is a government of men, not of laws." Now if these university professors will just recognize the parallel that exists between themselves and every other man who works for his living, with head or hands, or both, they will find something that will be of advantage to them and their union. It must be evident to them as it is to working class men, that there is somebody who is deadly opposed to free speech, truthful teaching, and academic discussions. It isn't the work- ing class man, and plainly it isn't the college and university pro- fessors. Just as evidently it must be somebody whose material interests are opposed to the interests of the working class man and the college professor. Perhaps men like William Barnes and Elihu Root can tell who it is. Starting to Think. One of the topics discussed in the national convention of educators yesterday was that of the social and industrial unrest and its possible outcome. The chief speaker had some rather gloomy views in which fear was strong in the mixture. It is one of the good signs for any country when its edu- 76 The Religion of a Socialist cators take up social and economic problems that always are the first in importance. It is evidence that educators have come finally to recognize the main function of education and to try to spread the truth about that function. Our education has come to be too much like our religion and our politics, matters of inheritance. That attitude has affected the best qualities of religion and politics, and it will also affect the best in education unless we watch it. Among educators the tendency is to divide into two extreme wings — one far advanced, the other far behind its time. The difference is so wide that the advanced men have been muzzled or are being mmzzled either by official censure and restrictions, or by outright dismissal. The men who are so far behind the times that they are scarcely representative of modern education have the floor, but they have lost their value as educators. Teachers, but not educators. Many years ago the good Quaker poet, John Greenleaf Whit- tier, advised the young men of his day to '‘seek for some just and despised cause and attach themselves to it.'’ Today we call upon all men and women, young and old alike, who believe that the Socialist cause is just, to attach themselves to it. By voting for Socialism if they have votes, by urging others to vote for it if they have no votes themselves; by carefully studying its litera- ture and equipping themselves to plead its cause successfully, either in private or in public, and to defend it whenever the need arises, it is. possible for every man and woman who believes in Socialism to identify himself or herself with it. That is the minimum of service to be expected from the earnest man or woman who believes that the Socialist cause is just and true. A still greater service is possible by joining the Socialist party, the organized effort of thousands of devoted men and women of all races and creeds to develop the Socialist movement in America along intelligent lines. The Socialist party exists primarily for the purpose of making Socialists. By a carefully organized propaganda Jt is possible for people to accomplish much more in the way of creating Socialist sentiment than the same people could accomplish by acting individually. Not only so, The Religion of a Socialist 77 but by having a well organized political party to carry on politi- cal campaigns it is rendered possible to keep the Socialist cause from being trailed in the dirt by freaks on the one hand, or by charlatans on the other. Organized in every state and territory, the Socialist party is open to every man or woman desiring to join it, provided that they renounce all connection with any and every other political party, and accept the principles set forth in the Socialist party platform and the rules of the Socialist party. The Socialist party differs in many important respects from every other political party. In the first place, all its members pay ‘‘dues,’" a small monthly sum, for the support of the party. This unusual practice is observed for the reason that it is a working class party ; it is the safeguard of the party against cor- ruption and betrayal. The other great political parties have no such system. The king can do no wrong' not only because he is above the law, but because every function is either performed or re- sponsibility assumed by his ministers and agents. Similarly, our Rockefellers, Morgans, Fricks, Vanderbilts and Astors can do no industrial wrong because all effective action and direct re- sponsibility is shifted from them to the executive officials who manage American industry ." — From Press Abstract of Report of United States Commission on Industrial Relations, 25,000 KILLED AT WORK. . While Americans are horrified at the carnage of European war, and devising methods to stop this holocaust, the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, Washington, D. C., calls attention to the fact that 25,000 wage workers of both sexes are killed in this country every year. During the same period the number of injured that are dis- abled more than four weeks approximate 700,000. These members, involving the killing and maiming of vast armies of American workers, fail to fully indicate the number of industrial accidents, for such studies as have already been made show that of accidents involving disabilities of one day and over, at least three-fourths terminate during the first four weeks, ' 78 The Religion of a Socialist, The bureau, in its statement, shows that metal mining ranks as the most hazardous, with a rate of four^ workers killed last year for every 1,000 employed. Coal mining comes next with a rate of 3.5, and fisheries and navigation follow with a rate of three per 1,000 employed. The industries which constitute the greatest number of fatal accidents, regardless of per cent employed, are railroad employ- ments and agricultural pursuits, each group being responsible for approximately 4,200 deaths each year. Coal mining con- tributes more than 2,600, and building and construction work nearly 1,000. The report says that compensation laws will lead to an in- crease in the reported number of accidents. Aggressive accident prevention work is urged, as it is stated that where this has been undertaken the number of accidents have been reduced one- half. The man who throws this economic and social problem squarely into the national convention of educators has done a good service. It doesn't make much difference what the attitude of this particular convention is toward the problem. The mere fact that some one courageous soul took the problem in and dropped it upon the floor, compelling everybody to at least take a good look at it, is enough for the day. It will set someone to thinking, and that, after all, is the main problem. Get men to thinking, and they will do the rest. The public, like juries, may often be wrong, but they are oftener right. CAUSE AND EFFECT. ‘‘There must be poor people in the world. We can't all be rich.” This is the view of a rich woman of New York, expressed with candor if not with full knowledge. If this woman were in politics she would be what is known as a standpatter or a re- actionary. She takes things as they are, and calls any other con- dition wrong or worse. When she says, “We can't all be rich,” she seems to have The Religion of a Socialist sensed something without knowing what that something is. A loud booming noise may be caused by the firing of a cannon, the rolling of the thunder or just a heavy blast in the quarry or on the excavating job with the muffler on. She didn’t know it and probably never will, but she hit on the truth of the case when she linked poverty and riches so closely. Without knowing why she instinctively believed that unless we have the poor, the poverty, we cannot have the riches and the comfort. She hit the truth squarely. We may not like to have all the poverty, so many of the poor, but when we realize that to give up the poverty, the poor, we must give up the riches, then we begin to see things in a different light. We can’t have the riches withont the poverty. We can’t have rich men, and women and children unless we have a much larger number of poverty- stricken men, women and children. The more poverty the more riches. They go together. Here is the greatest obstacle to changes in our social rela- tions. It would be desirable, even the broad-minded rich admit that, to have the world free of poverty, and the suffering that flows from it, but it would be disaster to have the world free of rich men, and women, and children. There’s the rub. If we could get rid of the poor people and their poverty with- out getting rid of the rich people and their riches there would be something different to work upon. But we can’t. For the riches of the rich are built upon the poverty of the poor. We can’t give up one without sacrificing the other. Nothing is plainer than if all were rich there would be no poor, and if all were poor there would be no rich. But let some advantage be introduced into the social machine and immediately those who have the advantage lose their poverty and those who were poor before become poorer. The poorer the poor become the richer become the rich. Riches is the child of poverty and she is a heartless and unfeeling child. She decks herself in fine feathers, and purple, and fine linen, and silks, and satins, while the mother at whose breast she fed goes hungered for a crust and a drink. The Religion of a Socialist When they meet the unnatural child turns her back upon the mother. She doesn’t know her. She feels safe because she knows that the maternal love of the mother will protect even an unnat- ural, unfeeling, and heartless child. Like the human mother, the social mother will starve herself to death that her child have luxury. This New York rich woman might have expressed herself just as w^ell by saying, ‘‘We can’t have children unless we have mothers.” The poor is the mother of the rich. Without the poor, and many of them, there could be no rich, not even a few. The poor give up their lives that the rich may be rich. Riches are built upon poverty. There must be plenty of the poor that the rich may be rich. Otherwise there could be no rich. If the rich knew clearly that they are the offspring: of the poor and of poverty, and if the poor knew clearly that it is their poverty that produces the rich, we should not have so many poor and so few rich. We should have more rich and fewer poor. Today man goes to his work with all his thoughts, talents and energy concentrated on one utterly debasing object — the ac- cumulation of money for money sake. No matter in what light you view such a man, you can regard him as only a hog. He is deaf to the voice crying in the wilderness, “Bear ye one another’s burden.” He is deaf to all finer feelings, he is walking on four legs instead of two; he is not seeking for light and guidance, but roots for pelf with his nose close to the ground as is cus- tomary with all other animals of his class actuated by no worthy motive, guided by no ennobling impulse. We get our ideals by looking upward and outward; we go to our doom by looking downward. Everything that can be done by machinery should be done. When all the heavy tasks are performed by whizzing wheels and bands of steel, men will have more time for recreation and there will still be enough pleasant tasks to be done by hand to keep humanity out of mischief.