Socialists, as a party, stand for violence only in the same way that Abraham Lincoln stood for it. If the Socialists should carry a national election in this country, and, the capitalists, refusing to yield, should turn the regular army at them, the Socialists would use all the violence they could muster. While they are in a minority, they are obeying the laws that the capitalists make, but when the Socialists become a majority, they will insist, even with bullets, that the capitalists obey the laws that the Socialists make. CHAPTER III THE VIRTUOUS GRAFTERS AND THEIR GRAVE OBJECTIONS TO SOCIALISM It is an old saying that the tree that bears the best apples has the most clubs under it. Enough clubs are under the tree of Socialism to stock a wood-yard. Some of the clubs bear the imprints of honest men. Some do not. The great grafters of the present day are the most persistent foes of Socialism. The great grafters say, not only that Socialism is anti-religious, but that it would destroy the family. The grafters also say that Socialism stands for free love. It may be amusing to hear a grafter oppose Socialism on the ground that it is against religion. It may be diverting to hear gentlemen with Reno reputations charge that Socialism would establish free love and thus destroy the family. But such charges cannot be dismissed by laughing at those who make them. Honest men and women want to know the truth. The truth is that there is no truth in the charge that Socialism is against religion. Socialism is purely an economic matter. It has no more to do with religion than it has to do with astronomy. It is no more against religion than it is against astronomy. Men of all religious denominations are Socialists, and men of no religious denomination are Socialists. Nor is there any reason why this should not be so. The very pith and marrow of Socialism is the contention that the people, through the government, should own and operate, for their exclusive benefit, the great machinery of production and distribution that is now owned and operated by the trusts. Either this contention is sound or it is not. Whether it is sound or not, a man’s religious beliefs cannot possibly have anything to do with what he thinks of it. But while Socialism is in no sense anti-religious, it is in one sense pro-religious. So good an authority as the Encyclopedia Britannica declares that “the ethics of Socialism and the ethics of Christianity are identical.” One of the concerns of Christianity is to establish justice upon earth. The only concern of Socialism is to establish justice upon earth. Socialism seeks to establish justice by giving each human being an equal opportunity to labor, while depriving each human being of the power to appropriate any part of the product of another human being’s labor. If the Socialist program contains a word of comfort for either grafters or loafers, neither the grafters nor the loafers have found it.