"However, we have woman suffrage in our platform, and we should stand by it. Because in the end it will help to interest the other half of humanity in social and political affairs, and it will be of great educational value on both women and men.... "Nevertheless, it is asking a great deal of the proletariat when we are requested to delay the efficiency of our movement _for generations_ on that count. And we surely ought not to lay such stress on this one point as to injure the progress of the general political and economic movement--the success of which is bound to help the women as much as the men."[153] (The italics are mine.) It is no wonder, with such a lukewarm advocacy of its own platform by the Party's organ and its chief spokesman, that some of the lesser figures in the Milwaukee movement--such as certain Socialist aldermen--seem to have lost the road altogether until even Mr. Berger has been forced to call a halt. For the leader of a "political machine," to use Mr. Berger's own expression, may allow himself certain liberties; but when his followers do the same, disintegration is in sight. Witness Mr. Berger's words, written only a few weeks after the Socialist victory in Milwaukee; words which seem to indicate that the tendencies he complains of were the direct result, not of slow degeneration, but of the local Party's reformistic teachings and campaign methods:-- "The most dangerous part of the situation is that some of our comrades seem to forget that we are a Socialist Party. "They not only begin to imitate the ways and methods of the old parties, but even their reasoning and their thoughts are getting to be more bourgeois and less proletarian. To some of these men the holding of the office--whatever the office may be--seems to be the final aim of the Socialist Party. These poor sticks do not know that there are many Socialists who deplore that the necessity of electing and appointing officeholders will make it twice as hard to keep the Socialist Party pure in this country, than in other countries where the movement is relieved of this duty and danger. "And even some of the aldermen seem to have lost their Socialist class consciousness--if they ever had any."