“There is only one way of saving our civilization--such as there is of it--from wasting away through the parasitic degeneration of a few of its parts and the malnutrition of the rest; and that is by frankly abandoning this _laissez-faire_ madness, and changing the state into a mechanism for the management of the nation’s business. We workers must get hold of the offices, and turn government into administration. Without that our strikes and boycotts, our ‘direct action’ and economic organization, arrive at little result; every strike we ‘win’ means that prices will go up, and our time and energy--and dues--have gone to nothing but self-discipline in solidarity. We can control prices only by controlling monopolies; and we can control monopolies only by controlling government. That means politics, and it’s a scheme that won’t work until the proletariat get brains enough to elect honest and sensible men to office; but if they haven’t the brains to do that they won’t have the brains to do anything effective on the economic or any other field. We know how hard it is to get people to think; but we flatter ourselves that our propaganda is an educative force that grows stronger every year, and has already achieved such power as to decide the most important election held in this country since the Civil War. “Already a large number of people have been educated--chiefly by our propaganda--to understand, for example, the economic greed that lies behind all wars. They perceive that so long as capital finds its highest rate of profit in the home market, capitalists see to it that peace remains secure; but that when capital has expanded to the point at which the rate of interest begins to fall, or when labor has ceased to be docile, because it has ceased to be unorganized and uninformed, capitalists then seek foreign markets and foreign investments, and soon require the help of war--that is, the lives of the workers at home--to help them enforce their terms on foreign governments and peoples. Only the national ownership of capital can change that. We thought once that we were too civilized ever to go to war again; we begin to see that our industrial feudalism leads inevitably to war and armaments, and the intellectual stagnation that comes from a militaristic mode of national life. We begin to see all history as a Dark Age (with fitful intervals of light),--a long series of wars in which men have killed and died for delusions, fighting to protect the property of their exploiters. And it becomes a little clearer to us than before that this awful succession of killings and robberies is no civilization at all, and that we shall never have a civilization worthy of the name until we transform our industrial war into the coöperative commonwealth, and all ‘foreigners’ into friends.” 3 _Eugenics_