“good time” is not for the businessman. He works, and works eternally. He works because he can’t stop ❦ And this is the man the Socialists are going to send to the fields! Jack London’s view of railroading is only from the bumpers. His philosophy can not deceive the section-hands, nor the train-crews, nor the operators, nor the managers. They work, and they work with care, precision, energy and economy. Each one does the thing he can do best. That is what we all do. If Jack’s hands were the strong hands he pretends, they would be grabbing plow-handles or a shovel, instead of reaching for a hand-me-out ❦ If the hands of Jack and his friends were strong enough, they would own this property towards which they now look with lustful eyes. ¶ The world will be redeemed; it is being redeemed. It is being redeemed not by those who shake the red rag of wordy warfare, who threaten and demand, but by its entrepreneurs—its workers, its inventors, its toilers—the men and women who do the duty that lies nearest them. ¶ The fallacy of the Jack philosophy lies in the assumption that the industries of the world would be much better managed by Jack and his kith than by the men who are now at the helm ❦ In other words, Jack’s claim is that Socialists are a peculiar, separate and distinct class of able, unselfish, competent persons with hands especially strong, who accidentally are out of the game, but who are soon to take possession of things and run everything in such a way that Society will be blessed and benefited as never before. ¶ The fact is, Socialists are not a separate and distinct class. We are all children of Adam and Eve, and the differences in us are more apparent than real ❦ We all have our limitations—read Carlyle! The weaknesses of humanity are inherent in Socialists—only perhaps in greater degree. Their doctrine of reaching Utopia through firing the men who now manage things is the doctrine of despair. Fabian Socialism is something else—it is opportunism ❦ It does what it can, now. It does not wait for a revolution—rather it believes in evolution ❦ We climb step by step. Fabian Socialism does not preach class hatred. In fact, it does not recognize that either the “class” or the “mass” exists. People who belong to one so-called class today are in another tomorrow. Most of our so-called predatory rich wiggled up out of the mass—and they may be poor again ❦ Many of the poor will be rich. Watch the immigrants landing at Ellis Island. Can you prophesy to what “class” these boys and girls—curious, quaint, half-frightened—will belong twenty years from now? Many of them will be contractors, lawyers, bankers, scientists, doctors, teachers—it is all a matter of individual energy, intelligence and desire, modified by the antics of the gods of Chance. There is no conspiracy in America to hold people down and under. Class hatred, represented by Marxian Socialism, says there is. There is nothing so savage, cruel and blindly unjust as class hatred.