PROEM.

HIS volume-Horace Greeley and other Pioneers of

TH

American Socialism—is neither biographical nor scientific, in the full sense of those words. Yet it partakes of both characters, albeit a sociological olla podrida with a modicum of seasoning à la doctrinaire. It has been written, however, with distinctly positive objects in mental view.

During the many years that I have been a Constitutional State Socialist I have found myself confronted with two serious obstacles blocking the path of my attempts to arouse my fellow American citizens from their political and economic lethargy. One of these hindrances has been willful literary misrepresentation and the other, woful ignorance of Social Science. The latter has been too frequently a result of the former. Strange as it may seem to minds of culture, the great majority of people in the United States still believe that Socialism and Anarchism are one and the same thing, never dreaming that there is a sharp distinction, if not an actual antagonism,-both theoretical and practical,-between the two.

My main object in having taken the Founder of the New York Tribune,—and presented him under various

aspects, but always as a Socialistic example so to say, in order "to point a moral and adorn a tale, -was not only to throw light on the darkness I have suggested, but to help in dispelling a few of the mists of unwarranted prejudice.

Horace Greeley, thus exhibited as a central figure, has enabled me to show Socialism in its true colors and as being constructive in its economic philosophy and constitutional in its political action.

I have also proved, in what I consider to be a satisfactory manner, that Socialism, so far from being of comparatively recent foreign importation to this country,-as fallaciously and popularly believed,—is really less European in origin than it is American in evolutionary development.

Organized Industry, as it has recently displayed itself to the community under such semi-Socialistic phases as the Farmers' Alliances, the Knights of Labor and other agricultural and manufacturing solidarities, I think has been demonstrated in the pages of this work to have imbibed much of its inspiration from the agitation undertaken over half a century ago in the Eastern States, through the propaganda then carried on by such agitators with pen and voice as Horace Greeley and his associates-George Henry Evans, Robert Dale Owen, Thomas Skidmore, Albert Brisbane, Parke Godwin, Charles A. Dana and others of the New York and Massachusetts groups of Socialists.

Political developments, furthermore, in the trend of the future Coöperative Commonwealth, such as the Nationalists, the People's Party and similar types, I have traced to the same incentives, which were but 'outgrowths of the Abolition Movement, that being in its turn the child of the political movement in New York State during 1826-1830, in the Tenth Plank of whose Platform was demanded "the abolition of chattel slavery and of wages slavery."

And it has not been forgotten that a fervent Socialist must be a good Christian from the economic standpoint of those primitive believers who had all things in common.

I have endeavored to make several other important points. One of these is that the very ancient "chestnut" and vulgar notion of Socialists wanting "to divide property up, giving every one an equal share," is the exact opposite of the truth,-for what they actually wish is that national wealth shall belong to the national collectivity, and that every one in the community shall have the absolute ownership, or rather the full value of the products of his or her labor. Another point is that Socialism, when finally accomplished, will, under the new conditions of scientific civilization, mean the greatest possible individual liberty for one and all, with due regard to the body social, economic and political, and certainly not a continuance of the suppression of individualism under a spurious system of freedom of contract with practical annihilation of one's personality, in that physical and mental purgatory which is the general

lot of the millions of the population of this Republic under the present Industrial System of Capitalistic Anarchy. Still another point made is, that "bad times" have always existed in America for most of our bourgeoisie or middle class, and more particularly for the whole of the proletariat; and that only those of their particular epoch who have been exempt therefrom were the Plutocrats.

But what has been to me a great delight in the compilation of this volume has been the production of the evidence, that the majority of the best authors of the United States have fought with their good pens on the side of Socialism. Let any one of my readers carefully scan the names of those Pioneers, who illumine the pages of this work, and I defy him or her to specify either creed or party in this country that can produce as the peers of these Socialists, as good citizens or their superiors in intellectual gifts!

What a galaxy of genius was represented by the editorial staff of the New York Tribune, when it was a Collectivist newspaper; and even yet more brilliant were the contributors to the Brook Farm Harbinger, the immediate organ of the American Socialists of half a century ago, under the editorship of George Ripley and Charles Anderson Dana.

Here are some of them :-Nathaniel Hawthorne, Theodore Parker, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Horace Greeley, James Russell Lowell, John Greenleaf Whittier, William Wetmore Story, Henry David Thoreau,

Albert Brisbane, Parke Godwin, Amos Bronson Alcott, James Freeman Clarke, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Robert Dale Owen, Frederic Henry Hedge, George William Curtis, the three Channings,-William Henry, William Ellery and Walter,-Orestes Augustus Brownson; and many others could be added whose names are also American "household words."

Yet, with all the possibility of literary enlightenment as to what Socialism was, not only had it, to use the words of Octavius Brooks Frothingham,* "a feeble hand in this country," after the death of the Harbinger in 1849, but a gloomier than Egyptian darkness environed it about, except where the sacred fire was kept alive by a few ardent souls like Horace Greeley. And the darkness has continued to our own day, but now the modern Socialist Movement, †— based on Science and Progress, has come forth like the Phoenix to achieve International triumphs.

But during that period of mental sheol adverted to, new generations arose and the great mass of Americans knew not Socialism; and the result of such ignorance among other instances was, that on October 8, 1887, a

* Transcendentalism in New England, page 331.

The final official returns of the vote cast by counties in the State of New York for the Socialist Labor Party ticket on November 3, 1891, were:-For Governor, Daniel De Leon, 14,651 votes ; for Lieutenant-Governor, Frank Gesser, 14,644; for Secretary of State, Frederick Bennetts, 14,384; for Comptroller, Henry Vitalius, 14,708; for Attorney-General, Henry C. Wilshire, 14,710; for Treasurer, James Withers, 14,824; for State Engineer and Surveyor, Charles Wilson, 14,755 votes.