Social sciences; United States -- Politics and government -- 1909-1913
It is true that the doctrines of communistic Socialism, if consistently
followed, mean the ultimate annihilation of civilization. Yet the
converse is also true. Ruin faces us if we decline steadily to try
to reshape our whole civilization in accordance with the law of
service, and if we permit ourselves to be misled by any empirical or
academic consideration into refusing to exert the common power of the
community where only collective action can do what individualism has
left undone, or can remedy the wrongs done by an unrestricted and
ill-regulated individualism. There is any amount of evil in our social
and industrial conditions of to-day, and unless we recognize this fact
and try resolutely to do what we can to remedy the evil, we run great
risk of seeing men in their misery turn to the false teachers whose
doctrines would indeed lead them to greater misery, but who do at least
recognize the fact that they are now miserable. At the present time
there are scores of laws in the interest of labor――laws putting a stop
to child labor, decreasing the hours of labor where they are excessive,
putting a stop to unsanitary crowding and living, securing employers’
liability, doing away with unhealthy conditions in various trades, and
the like――which should be passed by the National and the various State
Legislatures; and those who wish to do effective work against Socialism
would do well to turn their energies into securing the enactment of
these laws.
Moreover, we should always remember that Socialism is both a wide
and a loose term, and that the self-styled Socialists are of many
and utterly different types. If we should study only the professed
apostles of radical Socialism, of what these men themselves like to
call “scientific Socialism,” or if we should study only what active
leaders of Socialism in this country have usually done, or read only
the papers in which they have usually expressed themselves, we would
gain an utterly wrong impression of very many men who call themselves
Socialists. There are many peculiarly high-minded men and women who
like to speak of themselves as Socialists, whose attitude, conscious or
unconscious, is really merely an indignant recognition of the evil of
present conditions and an ardent wish to remedy it, and whose Socialism
is really only an advanced form of liberalism. Many of these men and
women in actual fact take a large part in the advancement of moral
ideas, and in practice wholly repudiate the purely materialistic, and
therefore sordid, doctrines of those Socialists whose creed really
is in sharp antagonism to every principle of public and domestic
morality, who war on private property with a bitterness but little
greater than that with which they war against the institutions of the
home and the family, and against every form of religion, Catholic
or Protestant. The Socialists of this moral type may in practice
be very good citizens indeed, with whom we can at many points
co-operate.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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