[Footnote 5: David Saville Muzzey, _Thomas Jefferson_, p. 311. "Generally speaking, one may say of the German soldier that he is normally good-natured and is not disposed to do injury to harmless people, so long as he finds no obstacles put in his prescribed way. But once disturbed, he becomes frightful, because he lacks any higher capacity of discrimination; because he merely does his duty and recognizes no such thing as individual conscience and, besides, when he is excited becomes at once blind and super-nervous." "The Germans are, indeed, a good-natured people, born to blind obedience and humble willingness to let others do their thinking for them." Wilhelm Mühlon, _The Vandal of Europe_, pages 172 and 251.] III ITS CONFLICT WITH THE BASIC PRINCIPLES OF DEMOCRACY AND RELIGION In the course of a conversation during the past winter one of the members of the present city government of New York remarked that although he was not a Socialist, yet he failed to see how the election of Morris Hillquit on his un-American platform to be Mayor of New York would have had any result except as regards the national safety and the immediate influence upon our international relations. He added that the life of the city would have gone on just the same for a time at least; hence why the great fear of Socialism? What this man failed to see was that in fact the life of the city would go on for a time without change only on account of the impetus the former democratic government had given. That the policy of individual responsibility and judgment, which had always been the professed aim of American government in the past, had produced leadership and popular experience by the process of natural selection, and that this leadership would last only until the time that the deadening influence of Socialism had its true effect. Let us consider for a moment the result of Socialism as a permanent policy. It means the substitution, as already shown, of government or official judgment and initiative for that of the individual. The whole process would be one to deaden and atrophy the powers of the people in general, with the result that there would follow a leveling down to a plane of mediocrity rather than a leveling up according to individual capacities and ambitions, exercised through equality of opportunity. It should not be forgotten that the varying degrees of success in the different walks of life finally have caused so-called social differences. These differences result from the attempt on the part of mankind to meet "the inequality of men in their capacity for the work with which they are confronted in this life," said the New York _Journal of Commerce_, with great acuteness, in a recent editorial discussion of the phase of the question.[6] It continued by saying,--