This cold and heartless ceremony typified the relation begotten of capitalist individualism in which men's interests are competitive and antagonistic and in which each instinctively looks out for himself and is on the alert to take every possible advantage of his fellow-man. The result of this system is inevitably a race of Ishmaelites. How differently two Socialist comrades shake hands! Their hearts are in their palms and the joy of greeting is in their eyes. They have the social spirit. Their interests are mutual and their aspirations kindred. If one happens to be strong and the other weak, the stronger shares the weakness and the weaker shares the strength of his comrade. The base thought of taking a mean advantage, one of the other, does not darken their minds or harden their hearts. They are joined together in the humanizing bonds of fellowship. They multiply each other and they rejoice in their comradely kinship. The best there is in each, and not the worst, as in the contact of individualism, is appealed to and brought forth for the benefit of both. What an elevating, enlarging and satisfying relation! And this is the "dead level" of mediocrity and servitude to which we are to sink when this relation becomes universal among men as it will in the International Socialist Republic! So at least we are told by those who in the present system have acquired the instincts and impulses of animals of prey in the development of their imagined superiority by draining the veins and wrecking the lives of their vanquished competitors, but we are not impressed by the virtues of the system of which they stand as the shining examples. * * * * * Thru all the ages past men, civilized men, so-called, have been at each other's throats in the struggle for existence, and the spirit of individualism this struggle has begotten, the spirit of hard, sordid, brutal selfishness, has filled this world with unutterable anguish and woe. But at last the end of the reign of anarchistic individualism is in sight. The social forces at work are undermining and destroying it and soon its knell will be sounded to the infinite joy of an emancipated world. The largest possible expression of the social spirit should be fostered and encouraged in the Socialist movement and among Socialists themselves. In spite of the hindrances which beset us in our present environments and relations, we may yet cultivate this spirit assiduously to our increasing mutual good and to the good of our great movement.