Socialism, in fact, is a spontaneous human reaction to individualist capitalism. In that hour when the grouping of privately owned wealth, in the hands and under the control of combined owners as partners or in the form of corporations, was made necessary by the increasing intricacy and expensiveness of machinery and the application thereto of steam power--the institution, in short, of the factory system--Socialism--the theory of the collective ownership of the means of production--became the inevitable reaction in the minds of persons and classes dissatisfied with the workings of the process. Naturally, these persons would be chiefly of the class of those who had nothing to contribute except their bare hands and brains--the proletariat. Bear in mind that we are not here discussing the merits of the theory. What Marx did was to elaborate and systematize the theory. And he did something else. The earlier preachers of Socialism were largely idealists, most of them of the Christian faith, who appealed to the sense of brotherhood, talked in terms of the Sermon on the Mount and the Kingdom of God. Later came, notably in the writings of Marx, the reduction of the whole business to materialist terms; the disappearance of all sentimentalism and religious terminology from the propaganda. Logically it is a short step to the atheistic extremes of merciless dictatorship by minority and the harsh suppression of opposition, exemplified in the rule of the so-called Bolsheviki. This is very important, because it affords the psychological background against which to see the reason why materialistic Socialism has to so great an extent failed to hold the allegiance of the naturally idealistic, church-bred, native American, and has so largely come to be a movement supported by the foreign born. For, whatever may be said about Socialism as not peculiarly of foreign origin, it nevertheless is a fact that in this country, in its aggressive political aspect, Socialism is preponderantly of foreign-born personnel, and to a large extent, though by no means exclusively, German and Jewish. It is impossible to present reliable statistics as to the number or racial distribution of Socialists, because, in the first place, there are thousands of persons of all races entertaining Socialistic ideas and theories who do not call themselves Socialists. The vote of the Socialist political parties includes large proportions of votes due to reasons other than Socialist views; the Socialist parties have in the past contained thousands of members who were not voters. Furthermore, there is no census or tabulation of Socialists that can be relied upon. THE SOCIALIST PRESS