The farmers of the Northwest, who make up the bulk of the Nonpartisan League, are not at present amenable to Socialist doctrine. The foreign born among them are largely Scandinavian and old-stock Germans who have won their way to ownership of land and a measure of personal prosperity. They might stand for the expropriation of the powerful Eastern capitalist, but they are not willing to consider the confiscation of their own hard-earned farms. Peter Alexander Speek, in his monograph on “The Single Tax and the Labor Movement,”[174] puts it well: It may be said that the Socialists understood the labor movement, its meaning and nature, better than did the Single-taxers. But what the Socialists failed in was this, that their philosophy, emphasizing as it did the social side of human life, was not acceptable to the majority of American wage-earners, who, though wage conscious and organized as a separate class, still were not yet class conscious--wage-earners among whom the individualistic spirit and a desire to become independent small producers prevailed. Even so early there was visible a racial line of demarkation. The Irish never have taken kindly to Socialism. Preponderantly of the Roman Catholic faith, they were impervious to the implications of the Socialist doctrines as affecting religion and marriage, and nothing in their experience tended to modify their interest in the ownership of land. Mr. Speek says: It is necessary to mention the fact that nationality of the members of the party (the United Labor party) also played its role in the conflict. The majority of the Irish element lined up with the Single Tax faction, the majority of the German element with the Socialist. This division by nationalities was itself quite comprehensive. The Germans have always had a strong communal sentiment and social viewpoint upon human life, both being inherited from the centuries long gone by. Furthermore, many of them, before they came to America, were industrial wage earners in Germany--the homeland of Marxian Socialism. The majority of the Irish immigrants had been formerly land tenants in Ireland. They had an individualistic viewpoint, and were devoted Catholics. Hence their lining up with Henry George, as a land reformer and agitator for the Irish cause in Ireland, and with McGlynn, as a Catholic priest. A large proportion of the farmers of the Northwest are Scandinavians. They are of a naturally conservative type, they have been successful in establishing themselves as individual property owners, and the property owner does not as a rule afford good material for the Socialist seed-sowing. You may regard the propaganda of the Nonpartisan League, for example, as radical and in a general way “Socialistic,” but it does not satisfy the Socialist.