Social sciences; United States -- Politics and government -- 1909-1913
So much for the academic side of unadulterated, or, as its advocates
style it, “advanced scientific” Socialism. Its representatives in
this country who have practically striven to act up to their extreme
doctrines, and have achieved leadership in any one of the branches of
the Socialist party, especially the parlor Socialists and the like,
be they lay or clerical, deserve scant consideration at the hands of
honest and clean-living men and women. What their movement leads to may
be gathered from the fact that in the last Presidential election they
nominated and voted for a man who earns his livelihood as the editor of
a paper which not merely practices every form of malignant and brutal
slander, but condones and encourages every form of brutal wrong-doing,
so long as either the slander or the violence is supposed to be at the
expense of a man who owns something, wholly without regard to whether
that man is himself a scoundrel, or a wise, kind, and helpful member of
the community. As for the so-called Christian Socialists who associate
themselves with this movement, they either are or ought to be aware of
the pornographic literature, the pornographic propaganda, which make up
one side of the movement; a pornographic side which is entirely proper
in a movement that in this country accepts as one of its heads a man
whose domestic immorality has been so open and flagrant as to merit
the epithet of shameless. That criminal nonsense should be listened to
eagerly by some men bowed down by the cruel condition of much of modern
toil is not strange; but that men who pretend to speak with culture of
mind and authority to teach, men who are or have been preachers of the
Gospel or professors in universities, should affiliate themselves with
the preachers of criminal nonsense is a sign of either grave mental or
moral shortcoming.
I wish it to be remembered that I speak from the standpoint of, and
on behalf of, the wage-worker and the tiller of the soil. These are
the two men whose welfare I have ever before me, and for their sakes I
would do anything, except anything that is wrong; and it is because I
believe that teaching them doctrine like that which I have stigmatized
represents the most cruel wrong in the long run, both to wage-worker
and to earth-tiller, that I reprobate and denounce such conduct.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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