And then, as I said, there is a second method—the method of the churches and clubs. Out in Chicago there was, four years ago, a man who thought there ought to be more Socialist books published than there were. He had no money; but he drew up a programme for a coöperative publishing house, to furnish Socialist literature at cost to those who wanted it. He got some ten thousand dollars in ten-dollar shares, and since then he has been turning out half a million pieces of Socialist literature every year. That seems to me a perfect illustration of what would happen in the new society, the second way in which books would be published. Such concerns—free associations, as they are termed in the Socialist vocabulary—would spring up literally by the thousands. They would cover every field that the liberated soul of man might be interested in, they would care for every type of thinker and artist, no matter how eccentric; they would offer encouragement to every man who showed the slightest sign of power in any field. The only reason we do not have many times as many of these associations as we have now, is simply that those people who really care about the higher things of life are almost invariably poor and helpless. One of the curious things which I have observed about those who pick flaws in the suggestions of the Socialist, is how seldom it ever occurs to them to apply their own tests to the present system of things. How is it with art and literature production now—are all the conditions quite free from objection? Is the man of genius always encouraged and protected, and set free to develop his powers? In the _North American Review_ a couple of years ago there appeared an article by Mrs. Gertrude Atherton, in which she set forth her opinion that “American literature to-day is the most timid, the most anæmic, the most lacking in individualities, the most bourgeois, that any country has ever known.” This seemed to perplex Mrs. Atherton very much—she could not comprehend why such a very great country should have a “bourgeois” literature. I replied to her in a paper which was published in _Collier’s Weekly_, in which I maintained that “American literature is the most bourgeois that any country has ever known, simply because American life is the most bourgeois that any country has ever known.” I shall quote a few paragraphs from the essay, which began with an attempt to define the word “bourgeois”: