American socialism is not a political doctrine; it is a state of mind. A man is an active socialist because he is afflicted with congenital insurgency: he was born a rebel. He rebels, not only against “the established order” in government, but against pretty nearly everything that takes his attention and enlists his thought, though not many things do. He is hospitable to only one idea at a time, in the service of which he foregoes the advantage of knowing much of anything else. He commonly, however, has an observing eye and a deep disesteem for the decent customs and conventionalities of his time and place. The man in jail for publication of immoralities is always a socialist, and the socialist “organ” has usually a profitable “line” of indecent advertisements. As the socialist erroneously regards the criminal, so he is himself rightly to be regarded. He is no heretic to be reclaimed, but a patient to be restrained. He is sick. You cannot cure him; it is useless to say to him: “Thou ailest here and there”; it is useless to say anything to him but “Thou shalt not.” His unreason is what he is a socialist with. That, too, is the cause of his inefficiency in the competitions of life, for which, naturally, he would substitute something “more nearly to the heart’s desire”—an order of things in which all would share the rewards of efficiency. Always it is the incapable who most loudly preaches the gospel of Equality and Fraternity—which, being interpreted, means stand and deliver and look pleasant about it. In the Cave of Adullam the credentialing shibboleth is “Love me, damn you, as I love myself.” A distinguishing feature of socialism as we have the happiness to know it in this country is its servitude to anarchism. In theory the two are directly antithetical. They are the North and the South Pole of political thought, leagues and leagues removed from zones of intellectual fertility. Anarchism says: “Ye shall have no law”; socialism: “Law is all that ye shall have.” They “pool their issues” and make common cause, but let them succeed in their work of destruction and their warfare would not be accomplished: there would remain the congenial task of destroying each other. The present alliance is no figure of speech. It is a fact, unknown to the follow-my-leader socialist, but not to his leader; not to observers having acquaintance with the proselyting methods of the time; not at the headquarters of anarchism in Paterson, New Jersey, where a great body of socialist “literature” is written, printed and set going. He who is not sufficiently “advanced” for anarchism is persuaded to socialism. The babe is fed with malted milk until strong enough for the double-distilled thunder-and-lightning of a more candid purveyance. Whatever makes for discontent brings nearer the reign of reprisal.