No amount of material progress and no reorganization of industry or government which does not promise to equalize opportunity,--however rapid or even sensational it may be,--is of the first moment to the Socialists of the movement. Wages might increase 5 or 10 per cent every year, as profits increase to-day; hours might be shortened and the intensity of labor lessened; and yet the gulf between the classes might be growing wider than ever. If society is to progress toward industrial democracy, it is necessary that the people should fix their attention, not merely on the improvement of their own condition, but on their progress _when compared with that of the capitalist classes, i.e._ when measured by present-day civilization and the possibilities it affords. _No matter how fast wages increase, if profits increase faster, we are journeying not towards social democracy, but towards a caste society._ Thus to insist that we must keep our eyes on the prosperity of others in order to measure our own seems like preaching envy or class hatred. But in social questions the laws of individual morality are often reversed. It is _the social duty_ of every less prosperous class of citizens, their duty towards the whole of the coming generation as well as to their own children, to measure their own progress solely by a standard raised in accordance with the point in evolution that society has attained. What would have been comparative luxury a hundred years ago it is our duty to view as nothing less than a degrading and life-destroying poverty to-day. Opportunity is not becoming equal. The tendency is in the opposite direction, and not all the reforms of "State Socialism" promise to counteract it. The _citizen owes it to society_ to ask of every proposed program of change, "Will it, within a reasonable period, bring equality of opportunity?" To rest satisfied with less--a so-called tendency of certain reforms in the right _direction_ may be wholly illusory--is not only to abandon one's rights and those of one's children, but to rob society of the only possible assurance of the maximum of progress. FOOTNOTES: [83] Henry George, "Progress and Poverty," Vol. II, p. 515. [84] John Mitchell, "Organized Labor" (Preface). [85] John A. Hobson, "The Crisis of Liberalism," p. 100. [86] For this and later quotations from Dr. Eliot in this chapter, see his little book entitled "More Money for the Public Schools." [87] See article by Dr. Eliot in the _School Review_, April, 1909. [88] "Knowledge and Education," the _Independent_, 1910. [89] Dexter, "History of Education in the United States," p. 173. CHAPTER VIII THE "FIRST STEP" TOWARDS SOCIALISM