“Your time will come; sooner or later you will find much the same condition of things in your own great cities. Do not believe that in some mysterious way—as your politicians and newspapers are trying to teach you—you, in America, are different from us. “We are all in the same boat, because the structure of society is everywhere the same. Money is literally king and god. It rules us everywhere, and it is bringing about a state of things with which the order imposed by a German Kaiser is a mild and beneficent régime. Indeed, I am not sure but that the greatest social crash will come in the United States, unless you soon come to recognize that a new order of things must be brought about. You pride yourselves upon your universal suffrage, but of what value is a vote to a poor man who must risk his bread and butter if he dares to vote contrary to his employer’s wishes? What avails universal suffrage when one third of your legislators can be bought, and votes go to the highest bidder? No; universal suffrage is totally inadequate to save us under the existing order of things. “I am a socialist simply because I am a rational human being, who knows the facts; because I am—I venture to think—endowed with reason and imagination. “I do not imagine, however, that socialism is going to produce any perfect ideal order. I simply see that the economic order which has sustained the civilized world for the past two or three hundred years is now falling in pieces and must be replaced by something; that we are approaching a period that will spell either socialism or chaos. “If unhappily chaos should come, it will be due to the opponents of socialism, which is the only peaceful, rational method of social organization under the new economic conditions, due to machine industry and the contraction of the world by means of the great scientific discoveries of our time. “If you want to see a fuller statement of my views and the grounds for them, look at the article on Socialism in the ‘Forum’ last month. But we socialists spend years in study, and we can’t give the results adequately in a brief form. Miss Brewster, I feel that you are in earnest, far more in earnest than most women whom I have met from your country. I do not wonder that you are perplexed. I would not change places with you. I would far rather have the sure conviction of the truth as I see it, and be of little power in advancing the cause I believe in, than to stand as you do, rich, powerful, overwhelmed with responsibilities, not knowing how to use your power, and trying in vain to patch up and prolong the existence of what is destined to be swept away ere the next generation shall have come and gone. “Smile at my pessimism if you like; time will verify my words. If ever you come to see this as I do, perhaps then I may suggest some things for you to do with your millions.”... (Miss Brewster’s reply to the foregoing letter.)