duction is left in great and ever-increasing measure to immigrants. These in turn, if at all favorably situated, develop in the next generation the same disinclination to toil, and so our industries call for an ever in-flowing stream of foreigners. This does not look as though the system under which we live were favorable to habits of industry. But the point germane to this present discussion is that the system does induce immorality, sets men preying upon one another, gambling in values that other men create, content to live upon a world for which they do nothing, in which they have no useful function unless it be to reproduce their species.

We have seen how by our unjust arrangements the unearned increment in land, obviously a social product, becomes the land-owner's perquisite. There is an unearned increment also in other property, arising from the same cause-growth of population — and which ought in justice to go to that population. Thus, advance in railroad stocks (other than spasmodic leaps speculatively induced) comes from the development of the country, the multiplication of its people and of their products, from the toil of a greatly increased number of human hands along the lines and at connecting points. It is, therefore, a social product, belongs of right to the people who have caused it. But, under existing conditions, it makes the fortune of individual stockholders and quickens the pulse of speculation. Socialism would put an end to all this. The people would own the railroads and all other public utilities, and the benefits would accrue

to the people. The rage of speculation would die. away for lack of anything to feed on, and the host of speculators would be reduced to the necessity of seeking some productive employment. We believe in the future of socialism because it will bring this immense moral gain.

So we may reasonably think that when the case is clearly set before the people they will see that there is, to say the least of it, a higher morality in securing to every worker the full net result of his labor than there is in permitting the capitalist entrepreneur to take the entire profit of production; and we may further reasonably think that when the course of higher morality is made plain to everybody, a way will be found to take that course; in other words socialism will result.

If, as Mr. Carnegie thinks, a sufficient reason for opposing the scheme of an income-tax is, "that it will make a nation of liars," one is at a loss to see what defense there is for a great part of the tax-laws already on the statute-books. Most taxes are more or less evaded by the same improbity that an incometax would provoke. A capitalist government which should disallow all imposts not favorable to morality would find itself reduced to straitened circumstances. It is the conspicuous feature of the whole social system that it incites falsifying, over-reaching, inordinate cupidity, and to such a degree that ever and anon there is uncovered in high places some scandalous exhibition of these vices, calling for a spasmodic legal fumigation of a city and the deportation to a

penitentiary of a batch of its officials and leading citizens. How then can we help thinking that this system must pass away, and that the sole practical substitute ever suggested must take its place?

It surely is not possible that an order of things that at so many points revolts the moral sense can be the final order. People are not going to persist forever in nurturing their children in a theory and practice at war with the best instincts of childhood, and to which the unsoiled, sensitive spirit at first yields with an unforgettable pang. The world will not forever keep up the farce of formally professing to honor a high moral code and at the same time notoriously disregard it wherever it obstructs the way to material gain; one of the two courses will certainly be abandoned. Either the profession, becoming more and more hollow and meaningless, will cease to be made, and we shall arrive at a stage undisguisedly conscienceless, with no shadow of faith in anything above the baseness of our practice; or the soul within us, "our life's star," will break through the clouds about us, will disperse them beyond our horizon, will command. our actions no less than our thoughts, and we shall have new heavens and a new earth. To them who believe that the moral sense in man is the sublimest

thing we know, - the final outcome of ages of evolution, that it is linked with what is supreme, deepest, highest, and mightiest in the universe, there can be no doubt as to the ultimate issue of this antagonism.

CHAPTER IX

SOCIALISM UNIVERSAL PEACE

Since so famous a warrior as General Sherman made the trenchant averment, "War is hell," nobody dealing with the subject need any more stand in fear of exaggerating its abominations. Presumably that characterization covers the worst that can be said. Still, with all the flame it suggests, the saying can hardly be called illuminating. The rough word of the predicate, once full of lurid light, has grown dull and vacuous in our day. Carlyle's picture of a definite typical bit of war is more to the present purpose:

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What, speaking in quite unofficial language, is the net purport and upshot of war? To my own knowledge, for example, there dwell and toil in the British village of Dumdrudge usually some five hundred souls. From these, by certain Natural Enemies' of the French, there are successfully selected during the French war, say thirty able-bodied men. Dumdrudge at her own expense has suckled and nursed them; she has, not without difficulty and sorrow, fed them up to manhood, and even trained them to crafts, so that one can weave, another build, another hammer, and the weakest can stand under thirty stone avoirdupois. Nevertheless, amid much weeping and swearing, they are selected; all dressed in red; and shipped away at the public charges some two thousand miles, or say

only to the south of Spain; and fed there till wanted. And now to that same spot, in the south of Spain, are thirty similar French artisans, from a French Dumdrudge, in like manner wending; till at length after infinite effort the two parties come into actual juxtaposition; and Thirty stands fronting Thirty, each with a gun in his hand. Straightway the word ' Fire!' is given; and they blow the souls out of one another; and in place of sixty brisk, useful craftsmen, the world has sixty dead carcasses, which it must bury, and anew shed tears for. Had these men any quarrel? Busy as the Devil is, not the smallest! They lived far enough apart; were the entirest strangers; nay, in so wide a Universe, there was even, unconsciously, by Commerce, some mutual helpfulness between them. How then? Simpleton! their Governors had fallen out; and instead of shooting one another, had the cunning to make these poor blockheads shoot. — Alas, so is it in Deutschland, and hitherto in all other lands; still as of old, 'what devilry soever Kings do, the Greeks must pay the piper!'-In that fiction of the English Smollet, it is true, the final Cessation of War is perhaps prophetically shadowed forth; where the two Natural Enemies, in person, take each a Tobaccopipe, filled with Brimstone; light the same, and smoke in one another's faces till the weaker gives in; but from such predicted Peace-Era, what blood-filled trenches and contentious centuries may still divide us!"*

* Sartor Resartus, Book 2, Chapter VIII.