That is, the Socialists provided for everything in the world except liberty, and to one whose dissolving illusions had left nothing but the dream of liberty in a world where liberty was not and probably never was to be, there was no allure in the proposal to take away even the dream of liberty. None of them of course would be impressed by these objections--was not the great cure for social ill written and printed on a card?--nor would they consider them even until they had been submitted to the prescribed test of a joint debate, about the most futile device ever adopted by mankind, and a nuisance as offensive as any that ever disturbed society. It was of course the only amusement they had, as popular as running the gauntlet was with the Indians, and they liked to torture a capitalist to make a Socialist holiday. It is of course quite useless to argue with one who is always right, one whose utterances have the authority of revealed truth, but inasmuch as society had not yet been developed to a point of communal efficiency sufficient to keep the streets clean, it seemed idle to undertake the communal control of production and distribution. And however wrong I may be in every other thing, I am quite sure that I am right in this, that in their analysis of society they have failed utterly to take into account that classic of the ironic spirit, the great law of the contrariety of things, according to which the expected never happens, at least in the way it was expected to happen, and nothing ever turns out the way it was planned. But there is a more fundamental law--that of the destructive power of force, which always defeats itself. For their reliance was on force--and how quietly they, or the most virile of them, entered upon their last phase in their acceptance of the doctrine of force as preached now everywhere by the I. W. W. agitator on the curbstone! Sometimes after all the law does not take a thousand years to work itself out. It seemed to me that the single-taxers had a scheme far better than that of the Socialists, since they suggested a reliance on the democratic, and not on the authoritarian theory, though in its mysterious progress, in its constant development of new functions, democracy may be expected to modify even that theory. I fear at least that it would not do away with mosquitoes; possibly not even with reformers. LV