Yet we are living under a system that makes private profits the basis of business. If profits are good, business is good. If profits are only fair, business is only fair. If profits are bad, business is bad. And, when business is bad, the whole country suffers, though the country has the men, the machinery and the land with which business might be made good. Socialists liken the present business edifice to an inverted pyramid resting upon its point—the point of private profits. Socialists have observed that the steadiest pyramids do not rest upon their points. They do not believe the pyramids of Egypt would have stood as long as they have if they had not been right side up. Socialists therefore propose that the pyramid of business shall be turned right side up. They believe it would stand more nearly steady if placed upon the broad basis of the people’s needs than it now does upon the pivot-point of private profits. That is all that Socialists mean when they talk about the “revolutionary” character of their philosophy. They want to make a revolutionary change in the basis of business. They want goods produced solely to satisfy the public need for goods, rather than to satisfy any man’s greed for profits. They do not see how business can be thus revolutionized, so long as a few men own all of the great machinery with which goods are produced. Socialists, therefore, propose that the ownership of all the great machinery shall be acquired by the people, by purchase, and thus transferred from a few to all. Those who are not in favor of this program may be divided into two classes. One class, desiring to cling to the private profit system, is opposed, upon principle, to the Socialist program. The other class, while eager enough, perhaps, to be rid of present conditions, does not believe the Socialist plan is practicable. The reason why so many men believe the Socialist plan is impractical is because so many men do not know what the Socialist plan is. The newspapers, owned as they are by capitalists, do not take the pains to tell the people much about the plans of Socialism. Even so great a trust lawyer as Samuel Untermyer of New York, apparently did not know much about the plans of Socialism until he debated Socialism in Carnegie Hall with Morris Hillquit. Mr. Untermyer, in his opening statement, made the colossal mistake of declaring that the Socialists had no definite plan for transferring the industries of the country from private to public ownership; that no one knew whether they meant to take over all industries, or whether they meant to take over only the trusts, while leaving the small concerns that are now fighting the trusts to compete with the government. In short, Mr. Untermyer left the impression that in the matter of putting their program into practice the Socialists were whirling around in a fog. Let us see who was whirling around in a fog.