the price of loaves has been materially reduced, the business yields to the co-operators a substantial profit. They have also large coal-yards, four butcher-shops, and twenty-five shops for the sale of bread and groceries. The result is that for the co-operators' own consumption the whole element of profit on these necessities is eliminated. Beside the main House of the People with its generous accommodations, they have five other smaller Houses at convenient points about the city, affording places of meeting, instruction, refreshment, and various entertainment for the members. No socialist having a day in Brussels should fail to visit the Maison du Peuple. Something under the name will be met with in neighboring lands, but hardly anywhere anything of the kind so pleasant to see.

If it must be admitted that, so far, the development of a socialist party in our own country is less of a success, it may justly be claimed that socialist tendencies in the old parties are even more notable here than elsewhere. Not a few of the leaders, Democratic and Republican alike, show by occasional utterances that they have caught something of the Collectivist spirit. They contend vigorously for the conservation of the forests, the mines, the natural sources of power, as the common property of the whole people; insist that the State regulate the industries, supervise transportation, check the greed of corporations, protect all manner of toilers from oppression. Political opponents are not slow in classifying these men with an unwelcome precision. Mr.

Bryan, three times Democratic candidate for President, has since been called, on account of his expressed opinions, the logical candidate of the socialists at the next election. Certain of the Progressive or "Insurgent" Republicans have shown even yet more decided leanings in the same direction. A correspondent of The Nation, coming to the defense of Theodore Roosevelt from editorial criticism, feels constrained to exonerate himself from the suspicion of a too partial judgment by protesting, "I am not a socialist." The ex-President some time since sought to forestall the charge of being one, by a much-resented aspersion of socialists in general; nevertheless no other public man in America has said and done so much for the furtherance of socialist tendencies.

Though the party as yet is imperfectly organized, it is not without its able leaders. Its numerous journals are vigorously conducted, one of them, The Appeal to Reason, ranking among the widest circulated papers in the world.

These are the beginnings of great things, taking shape under adverse conditions, in the face of dominating capitalism which throws every possible obstacle in the way. They are intimations of what could be accomplished by the united effort of government and people for the equal weal of every citizen.

CHAPTER IV

THE NEXT STEPS TO BE TAKEN

On all sides there is a more or less pronounced feeling that grave social and economic crises are at hand. It manifests itself in the feverish apprehension of political parties, even the oldest and most conservative, over the growing power of the trusts, the rapid accumulation of wealth in the hands of a small minority which tends ever to strengthen itself by closer and closer combination, a plutocracy that already by the very force of enormous aggregations of capital threatens to dominate everything. It is a minority of a few thousand millionaires and multimillionaires, easily to be held in check in a democracy, one might think, by the rest of the people many thousand-fold more numerous. But the barons of finance "are for their own generation wiser than the children of light." Without in the least endangering their personal control, they have absorbed into their combinations in large measure the small properties of a great middle class, and so acquired the vigorous support of a considerable body of the politically influential. These people who have poured their savings into the gigantic maw of the trusts, or into enterprises which the trusts have swallowed up, since they derive their little incomes from the dividends of these great concerns, are bound, like a mercenary soldiery,

to stand guard around the trusts, to resist and ward off the assaults of an aroused and noisy, but unorganized, poorly armed and equipped, and so not very dangerous multitude. Still, these guardians are anxious and troubled, for no one can tell at what moment a wave of indignation may sweep over the country, or what havoc it might make with political calculations should it come on the eve of a presidential election. So the party in power is hedging, seeking to show deference to a popular demand, while still acting in a manner not to alienate the money-power which has so generously contributed to its past successes; and the opposition, less cautious, hurls fiery denunciations at the plutocracy. All around there is a sense of something momentous impending, a conviction that present tendencies along certain lines are leading to conditions that will be unbearable and bring about a fearful catastrophe.

The steady advance in the price of food, whatever may be the occasion of it, is ominous, immediately disturbing to the masses whose income, as a rule, barely suffices for necessary outgoes, and begetting anxiety in reflecting minds as to the future. If, as some are saying, the rise of prices results from the manipulations and machinations of those who are in a position to control the food supply, there is here the worst impeachment yet laid against the trusts; for they would appear to have the consumers by the throat, and to be fully equipped morally and materially to practice an unlimited extortion, compelling every man, woman, and child to pay an excessive price for

subsistence under pain of forfeiting, not one pound of flesh as Shylock weakly proposed, but every pound on their bones. Hardly less startling is the prospect if, as others think, food is getting higher because of the failure of production to keep pace with normal consumption and abnormal waste; for the remedy in that case is greatly more complex and difficult of application, involving a change of the people's habits, and the institution on a large scale of intensive culture of the soil, a regression of the toilers from the cities. to the fields, in short, something in the nature of a social revolution.

Then there is the persistent problem of pauperism, not all the progress of the ages tending in the least to reduce it. On the contrary, as wealth increases and, by a fatality inseparable from the present order, falls more and more exclusively into the hands of a class, another class is left in destitution more dis tressing than is commonly seen in ruder civilizations. The new country, where population is sparse and nobody is rich, has no extreme poverty to complain of; that evil comes with the cultivation of the fields, the making of beautiful homes, the building of pleasant towns and splendid cities. The larger and richer your city the higher the percentage of the desperately poor, the more appalling the misery that stalks through the darker quarters. For a glimpse of the worst poverty and the most of it, one must go to New York or to London, where values astounding, values to ransom an empire, are daily exchanged. Lands that boast the very highest civilization have no end of