With little more regard to the source of their wealth than the church, the philanthropies of to-day have far less regard for the final results of their benefactions. As with the educators, it is enough for them, so to speak, to improve the breed. The apparent philosophy behind their program is that when the proletariate is bathed, educated, and made healthy, it will be civilized, and therefore competent to take over the world (including universities and steel mills, railroads and hospitals) and run it. But the executives of these great organizations would probably protest against this reading of their expectations almost as quickly as the donors of the funds; certainly they show no readiness to meet the proletariate half-way on its upward path. Clearly, you cannot wash, teach, and invigorate society without powerfully affecting the whole social fabric. The feeble experiments of the nineteenth century in universal education have already proved that. Some transformation the great endowments of our age are laboring to bring about. For the creating of a new race they have a plan, but not for its salvation, even on this side of heaven. Indeed, as the German experience shows, they may even become instruments by which the common man is made a mere tool firmly grasped by the hand of authority. Common sense alone governs them. Their vision is bent upon the immediate, not the ultimate, future. A little vague these criticisms may seem to the practical mind; and vague, when philosophically considered, are the aims of American radicalism. Very different, indeed, they are from the clean-cut programs of the European radical. There is little vagueness in socialism, little vagueness in syndicalism, the very opposite of vagueness, despite the efforts of the American press, in Bolshevism. In all these systems the past is condemned, the present reconstructed, and the future made visible with a lucidity that betrays their origin in efforts of the pure reason. That, of course, is the difficulty--at least to American and most British intelligences. The aim of Bolshevism is so definite as to be almost mathematical. Society as a whole is considered economically, and a program deduced that will fill the most mouths with the least labor. To be sure, stomach-filling is not the sole purpose of Lenine and his followers. They argue, and with more right than our easy-going bourgeois civilization is willing to concede, that idleness, unrest, and crime are more often the result than the cause of poverty. Nevertheless, the type radical of the European variety does unquestionably rest his case upon the premise that man is merely a tool-using animal. Ask a Bolshevik where civilization is going, and he will answer you with ease and explicitness. Ask the average American, and he will either reply in vague platitudes or deny both knowledge and responsibility. Of the two men he is less likely to be wrong.