They are bringing it about gradually in Australia and New Zealand—the only countries in the world in which the people are effectually regulating the progress of the Juggernaut of Capitalism. That is because these countries are very young, with comparatively little capital, no slums, and an intelligent working-class. I have an idea—I do not know whether there is anything in it—that the extraordinary success of New Zealand may in part be due to the fact that it was a convict-settlement; the men whom capitalism makes into criminals being for the most part a very superior class of people, active, independent, and impatient of injustice. Transported to a new land, and given a fair chance, I should think that a burglar or a highwayman ought to make a very excellent Socialist. You ask, perhaps, if the thing is not also being accomplished gradually in England and on the Continent; you point to “Municipal trading,” to the London County Council, to the state-owned railroads and telephones of Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, etc. You have been accustomed to hear these things referred to as State Socialism, and you have accepted the statement—not understanding that the essence of Socialism is democracy, and that it is fundamentally opposed to paternalism in every conceivable form. Municipal and State ownership is not State Socialism at all, but State Capitalism. Under it, the government buys certain franchises, pays for them with bonds, and then runs the roads to pay the bondholders. Undoubtedly it is a better system for the people than private Capitalism, for the reason that it fixes the exploiters’ tax, instead of letting stock-watering go on indefinitely. But, unfortunately, economical administration by the State is possible at present only in such countries as have an aristocratic governing-class, jealous of the power of the capitalist. In this country the holders of the municipal bonds, who also own the street-car factories and the steel mills and the coal mines, would use the interest they got from the city to bribe the city’s servants to pay exorbitant prices for all the street-cars and steel rails and coal and other supplies which the city would have to have in order to operate the roads. You have seen that perfectly illustrated in the case of our Post Office. For example, we pay the railroads in rent for our mail-cars twice as much per year as it costs to build the cars; and the cars are so flimsy that the insurance companies, which own a large share of the railroads and the cars, refuse to insure the lives of the mail-clerks who work in them!