at the saloon upon the money which his wife and children earn. One finds them in every Southern mill-town. It is under these conditions that every variety of a vicious truck system of wage payment springs into existence. One wanders about in some of these communities in a kind of dream, as if he had been spirited back into an English factory town of two generations ago.

A common argument to justify this great wrong is that as England had to pass through this stage so must the South pass through it. This is an excuse, it is not an argument. The very meaning of social politics is that it gathers experience for practical use in just such issues as child labor. There is no need that we should pass through all the desolating stages of that former experience. In the England of 1825 there was no precedent. Aside from the splendid achievements of the English acts and preventive legislation coupled with popular education, our own states, like Connecticut, Minnesota, and Massachusetts, have legal limitation as to age and compulsory school attendance which check these evils at their source. A competitor of Robert Owen, who pronounced legal interference with child labor the "maudlin sentimentalism of those who knew neither business nor human nature," had been making in the cotton business, according to his own admission, two hundred per cent in yearly profits. Yet he and his fellows held that they could not afford to dispense with child labor because that would drive business out of England. The Southern mills do not make such profits, but some of them make thirty per cent, and use the same argument that they cannot

afford to do away with the child's help, because of Northern competition. Northern capitalists have more humiliation in this wickedness than Southern, because the main issue has been long under discussion in the North.1 Compulsory school attendance during the period in which employment is prohibited is now required in seven states. In every instance where this has been enforced, as in Massachusetts, there has been no difficulty in keeping children out of industries.

In Pennsylvania, in an atmosphere thick with black dust and vibrating with the roar of the crushers, one may see an army of breaker boys sorting the coal and picking slate. Hundreds of these children cannot be above ten and eleven years of age. The parents sanction a lying certificate of age, and the employers are indifferent. After three or four years at the breaker, they pass to the mine proper. Equality of opportunity in no conceivable sense belongs to these boys. If they had been born crippled or stupid, that inequality would be out of our control, but much of the handicap under which they now struggle can be removed. Three or four years of school at this age multiplies life's chances for every one of these youths.

Especial emphasis is here given to those instances that have to do with the child defrauded of its educational rights, because education in its best and largest sense carries the deepest hope of all ultimate attainable equalities. Careful training for one's

1 The absurd differences in the standard of industrial regulation in our various states has this advantage for the student, that it enables him to bring into vivid comparison a score of conflicting policies.

tasks is two or three times more necessary than it was in times that old men still remember. Exceptional force will overcome these barriers with little or no schooling, but commonplace and average capacity, that has to-day scant and slovenly training, is disadvantaged as never before in history.

If we bring the least disposition toward fair interpretation, we may now see what the best spokesmen in the labor and socialist movement ask. As they frankly recognize the final passing away of the Utopian stage, as they recognize the uselessness of isolated colony schemes, their conception of social equality is no longer a visionary freak, but has as much soberness as most of our saner social ideals.

The "passion of the democracy" has the perfectly rational aim that is expressed in the term "multiply life's chances." It is a quantitative expression. No influence that society has at command could give complete equality to these breaker boys or to the child victims in Southern mills. Yet we can give a great deal more equality. If the reader wonders. why so poor a platitude requires statement, the answer is that these simple facts are necessary to show that the best of our socialist critics are asking merely for these further steps toward the more equal life. They are asking for what all fair men admit to be a just and rational aim in social bettering.1

1 The question of equality could of course have no complete discussion without including the first practical purpose of a militant collectivism, to socialize the means of production and to use the resources of a fairer system of taxation to strike at the present roots of economic privilege. These sources of inequality are, however, a part of the discussion in the entire volume.

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CHAPTER VIII

SOCIALISM HISTORY AND THEORY

THERE is no audience before which it is safe to speak upon this subject without careful definition of terms. The stock definition is the appropriation by society of the means of production. But if socialism is taken at its highest point of development, general definitions will gain in clearness if they are preceded by some reference to history, and especially if experiments now under trial are carefully considered.

Some one has collected "ten thousand definitions of religion." One could gather as many of socialism. The propelling thought behind it has so changed during the last century that one seems to be dealing not with one thing, but with many.

The explanation is that from the point of view of history, socialism has been a growth, reflecting upon one side social and trade conditions of the time; upon the other the ideals of the writer. These have changed, just as ideals have changed in education, in politics, and in religion. The socialism of the French Revolution differs from that of our day as the science and the politics of that day differ from our own. It is well to know something of this history, but to define socialism in the terms of these earlier dreams is misleading. Communism is as old as human society; socialism is essentially modern and

is hardly conceivable apart from the capitalism which created it.

Socialism is often defined as a philosophy, and so limited, it is legitimate to use large abstractions about equality, fraternity, and justice. These abstractions, however, fail us at the point where our need of light is greatest. That society should be just, free, and fraternal wins ready assent, but how is this splendid goal to be reached? Campanella, Bacon, and St. Simon, as Plato before them, tell us we have only to make the wisest and best men our political officials. This would be our plan also, but we are poor bunglers in carrying it into practical effect. We are now and then very eloquent about he good man's political responsibility, but are vexed death to know the ways and means through which t sest and best can be selected to govern us, and kept in their places. The difficulty has not been with the statement of principles, but in their everyday application. Thus socialism, in its merely philosophic aspects, leaves our hardest questions still unanswered.

Again socialism is treated as a religion. Poetic license here reaches its climax. We are told that socialism is "a life," that it is a "religion," that it is an "aspiration." The difficulty with this phrasing is that it fails to distinguish its object from twenty others. If socialism is a life, a religion, an aspiration, so are Buddhism and Christianity; so is the Faith-cure; so are the Ethical Societies. These vague uses of the term are not more objectionable than it is to make socialism merely an affair of

1 Proudhon said in 1848, "Le Socialisme c'est toute aspiration vers l'amélioration de la Société."