All that was common to these partisan utopias was a desire to get rid of positive evils such as overwork or starvation or irregularity of employment. In their rejection of the existing order of Coketown, with its rubbish heaps for the disposal of material waste, and its jails, hospitals, sanatoria, doss houses, Salvation Army Headquarters, and charitable organizations for the disposal of the human excrement of industrialism--in turning their backs upon these things and asserting the simple elements of human dignity, all our radical programs were right and inevitable. To reject what industrial society had to offer its members in the filthy factory districts and wretched slums of Coketown was obviously to reject barbarism and degradation of the worst sort: the incredible thing about the industrial revolution, indeed, is not that there were a few riots here and there against the use of machinery, but that the industrial population has not been in a state of continual insurrection, and that the industrial towns have not been looted and razed again and again. It is nothing less than a tribute to the fundamental good nature and sweetness of human beings that the strikes by which the workers have expressed their sense of grievance have not demolished the material hovels that today stand upright in the valleys of York-Riding, in the valleys of the Ohio and its tributaries, or in that terrible slum which stretches in back of the Jersey meadows from Elizabeth into Patterson. There are many districts in these areas which are scarcely worth the respect of orderly demolition. To give a grim rejection to the society that produced them only mildly meets the situation. They should be destroyed by trumpets and God’s wrath--like Jericho! So much for what is sound and valid in the various one-sided programs for reform. But if their attitude towards the past performances of industrialism was sound, their gesture towards the future, and their attitude towards the whole milieu, was little less than indifferent. There were to be certain gains in money wages, in political control, in the distribution of products, and so forth; but the realization of these gains was never projected in any very vivid way--a vague fellowship in peace and plenty under gay red banners was all that was left over when the current efforts to “educate the masses,” “revise the constitution,” or “organize the revolution” were taken for granted.