"Therefore," he says, "each of the 500,000 Socialist voters, and of the two million workingmen who instinctively incline our way, should, besides doing much reading and still more thinking, also have a good rifle and the necessary rounds of ammunition in his home and be prepared to back up his ballot with his bullets if necessary.... Now, I deny that dealing with a blind and greedy plutocratic class as we are dealing in this country, the outcome can ever be peaceable, or that any reasonable change can ever be brought about by the ballot in the end. "I predict that a large part of the capitalist class will be wiped out for much smaller things ... most of the plutocratic class, together with the politicians, will have to disappear as completely as the feudal lords and their retinue disappeared during the French revolution. "That cannot be done by the ballot, or _only_ by the ballot. "The ballot cannot count for much in a pinch."[187] (My italics.) And in another number Mr. Berger writes:-- "As long as we are in the minority we, of course, have _no right to force_ our opinion _upon an unwilling majority_.... Yet we do not deny that _after we have convinced the majority of the people_, we are going to use force if the minority should hesitate."[188] (My italics.) Few will question the revolutionary nature of this language. But such expressions have always been common at critical moments, even among non-Socialists. We have only to recall the "bloody-bridles" speech of a former populist governor of Colorado, or the advice of the _New York Evening Journal_ that every citizen ought to provide against future contingencies by keeping a rifle in his home. Revolutionary language has no necessary relation to Socialism. Mr. Berger, moreover, has also used the threat of revolution, not as a progressive but as a reactionary force, not in the sense of Marx, who believed that a revolution, when the times were ripe and the Socialists ready, would bring incalculably more good than evil, but in the sense of the capitalists, for whom it is the most terrible of all possibilities. It is common for conservative statesmen to use precisely the same threat to secure necessary capitalist reforms. "Some day there will be a volcanic eruption," said Berger in his first speech in Congress; "a fearful retribution will be enacted on the capitalist class as a class, and the innocent will suffer with the guilty. Such a revolution would throw humanity back into semi-barbarism and cause even a temporary retrogression of civilization."