It is amusing to note that these same Socialists are busily occupied with pointing out what they consider to be the failures of government, as well as of "business and capitalism." Yet they do not realize that they are thus condemning their own system, for if the governments of the world have failed to do the work at present laid upon them, how can they ever undertake the gigantic additional political and capitalistic burden that Socialism would impose? Thomas Jefferson, the patron saint of the party that President Wilson now leads, always expressed a fear of "too much government." It would appear that the present Administration and the Democratic members of Congress have wandered far from their old beliefs, and if recent legislation is the result of it, their Socialistic experiments have not been much of a success. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 1: _The English-Speaking Peoples_, p. 203.] SOCIALISM--IS IT AMERICAN? I ITS CONFLICT WITH THE IDEA OF EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY One of the main difficulties in discussing Socialism is to find a working definition; for this political or social movement is based upon a system of a priori reasoning which often is vague and lacking in deductions from practical experience. Socialism also is unreal in its assumptions and impractical in its conclusions, so that a person finds it almost impossible to give a definition that will include within its scope all the Socialistic vagaries and explain all the suppositions based upon nonexistent facts. Bearing this difficulty in mind, perhaps the following will serve as a working definition for the purposes of the present discussion. Socialism is the collective ownership (exerted through the government, or society politically organized) of the means of production and distribution of all forms of wealth. This means wealth not alone in mere terms of money but in the economic sense of everything that is of use for the support or enjoyment of mankind. Of course "production and distribution" means the manufacture and transportation of all forms of this economic wealth. Inevitably this system would imply the substitution of the judgment of the government, or of governmental officials, for individual judgment, and for individual emulation and competition in all forms of human endeavor. Dr. David Jayne Hill recently has remarked that "if the tendency to monopolize and direct for its own purposes all human energies in channels of its own [i.e., the government's] devising were unrestrained, we should eventually have an official art, an official science and an official literature that would be like iron shackles to the human mind."[2] The Socialist probably would object that this statement is extreme, but at least it is logical, and if Socialism be reasonable it must be logical, and it must be both reasonable and logical if it is to be popularly accepted.