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been cheaper, making subsistence less precarious. But we are behind in this matter chiefly for another and very different reason. At the very time when Lassalle in Germany and Marx from his covert in England were laying down the principles of the great social reconstruction and waking Europe to the strife for new social ideals, we were absorbed with the belated slavery question, elsewhere long before disposed of by enlightened nations. It was a social question, a social evil, we had to deal with; but we dealt with it politically, and with weapons of war. So it came about that though slavery was in form abolished, the social question involved in it remained unsettled, remained under the new conditions even more acute and more disturbing than ever. The artificial juxtaposition of races so distinct instituted to meet the exigencies of a state of society so different from that which has supervened, a daily, hourly contact, become repugnant but not possibly to be avoided — turns into a source of the gravest difficulties, and is calculated to render the administration of political and social justice on the boasted American principle of equal rights, even where attempted, a failure if not a mockery.

While in the progressive countries of Europe millions are awake and astir for a better social order, in many quarters all good citizens combining efficiently for purity in municipal government, establishing municipal ownership of public utilities, introducing new

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and revolutionary fiscal ideas; incorporating, in short, in law and custom many of the principles of socialism, we have to confess a shameful backwardness along some of these lines. We are not as inquiet under existing conditions as we ought to be. We are too generally indifferent where we have reason to be profoundly concerned; too free from that troublesome but saving Unrest which is the generator of progress, the vis medicatrix naturæ for social ills.

But there are indications in this present time that public sentiment is at a turning point with us. Every now and then a voice is heard from an unexpected quarter, chiming in with voices more familiar, calling upon a people so great in spite of their faults, and having such unrivaled opportunities for greatness yet unattained, to get uneasy at the spectacle of municipal corruption, of graft and criminal greed, almost daily brought to light, and to consider from what is exposed what must be the unmeasured extent and what the baseness deep and damning of that which remains under cover. It is beginning to be more commonly seen and said that Mammon-worship is threatening the destruction of a people whose start among the nations, whose geographical situation, the productivity of whose soil, the extent of whose territory, and the imperishable glory of certain of whose heroes, should go far to make the happiest and best in the world. Let us hope the warning will be heeded in time!

CHAPTER II

AN UNCONSCIOUS SOCIALISM MAKING ITS WAY IN LAW AND CUSTOM

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The two fundamental purposes of socialism are: collective ownership of the instruments of production - land, factories, utensils, machinery,—lifting labor out of bondage to capital; and the abolition, or great restriction of, inheritance, so that every person may (except in so far as natural endowments differ) have approximately an equal chance in the world. These objects appear, to those who have candidly considered them, so eminently desirable, so imperatively demanded by simple fairness and decency, and in view of the fact that the ones to be benefited are an overwhelming majority so attainable withal, at least in a democracy, as to have encouraged the expectation that they are to be speedily realized. Brilliant writers have ventured to indicate quite definitely the period within which we might look for the fulfilment of our hopes, the coming of the social revolution. These calculations impress us, after having lived past one and another of the dates set without seeing anything of the kind taking place, much as do the determinations certain lugubrious people are always making of the last day and the end of the world. At present socialists generally are coming to doubt that the substitution of a new

social order for the old is to be brought about by a sudden overturning; to think rather that the end is to be reached by the gradual processes of evolution now going on under their eyes, processes whose beginning is hidden in a far distant past, which have been accelerated in our day, but not so as to bring the consummation within sight.

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If this is the method on which the social order is to be changed, the history of the changes that have already taken place, could it be laid before us, would be of the greatest value. From the direction and tendency of past modifications, especially those of recent date, we might be able reasonably to infer something as to what is to follow, might find ground to strengthen our hopes on long lines, however it might fare with our enthusiasms touching immediate results. Such a history is beyond the limits of this work, and we must content ourselves with a hurried glance over a most interesting field.

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

Whatever has been done at any time by any people, or by their representatives, directly for the public benefit or for the relief of a dependent class, is in its nature socialistic. Never a highway constructed, or a path, for whatever human feet may need to take it, blazed through a forest, but is to be so characterized. Public improvements, that is, improvements made for the general good and for no ulterior private or political end, are socialistic improvements. The

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church, and the cathedrals which are its monuments, so far as they serve the whole people, and at any rate as regards those they do serve, have a socialistic quality; as do all brotherhoods and their temples where men meet on equal terms and pledge themselves to mutual services. The same is to be said of schools, from the first of them that ever was established. The family, where all are lodged in one house, eat at one table, draw upon a common store, material and spiritual, to which they severally contribute, is the very prototype of the communistic social order, unless we prefer to give that distinction to the tribe in the early stages of its development. For the tribe in those stages was distinctly communistic. Not only was the territory occupied — principally serving for hunting and fishing- a common possession for all members of the tribe; it could not by any sale be alienated from them to cut them off from its use for those purposes, as the early settlers of Pennsylvania found. The rudest savages lived in huts which were only nominally private property, belonging about equally to all other members of the tribe. The more developed tribes built them communal habitations of considerable size, capable often of sheltering several hundred persons. In some of the islands of the South Pacific, La Perouse came upon tribal houses three hundred and ten feet long by thirty feet in width and twenty feet high, having the appearance of an inverted boat. An entrance at each end opened into a passage-way, on

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