How long would the parliamentary clatter of socialism have mechanically kept on--had it not been for the dislocation of war? How long could its abstract programs have remained in the air, before coming down to specifications? I obviously cannot answer these questions; but it seems plain enough that our radical programs have had simply a sentimental interest: they moved people without giving them a specific task, they stirred them emotionally without giving them an outlet, and so, at best, they are but partial utopias of escape, using the powers of organization, collective meetings, and pronunciamentos to take the place of the emotional stimuli which the avowed utopia of escape, like News from Nowhere, supplies by introducing a beautiful girl. In this aspect, the Socialist Party, with its revolutionary demands, did not differ in its psychological performance from the Republican Party, which specialized in the rhetorical device of the full dinner pail; nor did it differ in any fundamental way from the defunct Progressive Party, which for a time believed in a new heaven and earth to follow the initiative, referendum, and recall with an intensity of moral conviction beside which the social revolutionist was positively tame. Who doubts the honesty and sincerity of most of the members of these parties? Who doubts their devotion to revolution or “uplift”? It is all beside the point. A machine which doesn’t work because it is badly constructed is just as useless as one that doesn’t work because its maker is a deliberate fraud; and all the sincerity and good will and honesty doesn’t make any one a smile the happier. It is about time that we faced the facts and realized that in all our sundry mechanisms of reform “there is a screw loose somewhere.” This pregnant metaphor of the industrial age is usually applied to neurotic disorder; and I am using it in the present context with fell intentions. I mean that the utopia of the partisan is, psychologically speaking, a fetish; that is to say, it is an attempt to substitute the part for the whole, and to pour into the part all the emotional content that belongs to the whole. When a man gets hold of a lady’s handkerchief or garter, and behaves towards that object with as much intensity and interest as he would towards its flesh and blood owner, the handkerchief or garter is said to be a fetish. I hazard the judgment that Socialism, Prohibition, Proportional Representation, and the various other abstract “isms” are the fetishes of the partisan: they are attempts to make some particular instrument or function of the community stand for the whole. It is doubtless much easier to filch a handkerchief than to win a girl. By the same token, it is easier to concentrate on the use of liquor or the ownership of machinery and land than upon the totality of a community’s activities. It is easier indeed; but it is fatal; for the result of this fetishism is perhaps that the girl remains unmated, and