Much of the vice? Did you ever consider how much vice would go if capitalism were to go? Did you ever realize to what extent vice is fostered by the profit system to which Socialism is opposed? No? Then read what Wirt W. Hallman, of Chicago, said before the American Society of Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis. Here it is: “If any city will take the profit out of vice, it will immediately reduce the volume of vice at least 50 per cent. If, in addition, it will make vice dangerous to men as well as women, to patrons, property-owners and business men as well as to dive-keepers and women street-walkers, it will reduce vice 75 per cent. or more, and will reduce the wreckage of health and morals in much the same proportion.” Socialism will not only take the profit out of vice, but it will take it out of everything. By enfranchising woman and making her economically independent, no woman would be compelled to sell herself to keep herself. Socialism, in this and other enumerated respects, is therefore not particularly materialistic. But what if it were wholly materialistic? What if its advocates thought of teaching nothing to the world but the best means of supplying itself with bread and butter, boots and shoes, caps and clothing, houses and lots? Do you now require your grocer to teach you ethics? Does your haberdasher supply you with spiritual food as well as neckties? If your house were burning, would you refuse the assistance of the fire department merely because the fire department is exclusively materialistic? The charge of “gross materialism” is but more sand thrown in the eyes of those who could not be so easily robbed if they could see Socialism. Socialists behold a world that is and always has been poverty-stricken. They say that for the first time in the history of the world it is now possible to remove poverty. And those gentlemen who might have to go to work if poverty were removed rebuke the Socialists because they do not sing psalms while talking about the bread and butter question. Assuredly, no flattery is thereby intended, but indeed what flattery this is. By inference, they tell the world that we are super-men. We could tell the world all it needs to know if it were not for the cussedness that causes us to harp on bread and butter. The real cause of such complaint is, of course, not that we are teaching the world too little, but too much. We could preach ethics and religion until the cows came home and not arouse a croaker. We could preach nothing until the cows dropped dead and still there would be silence. But when we proclaim the right of the individual, not only to work, but to possess all he creates, the gentlemen who create nothing and own everything fire at us every brick within reach.