“There could be no propaganda in behalf of Socialism,” he said to me, “one hundredth part so effective as the unchecked activity of men who imagine themselves the bulwarks of social order and the bitterest foes of Socialism. We have no quarrel with the increasing centralization of capital. The opposition to ‘trusts’ and the like comes mainly from the _bourgeoisie_, who feel themselves being forced out of independent business. We Socialists are already of the proletariat, and we see clearly that all trusts and syndicates are the inevitable forerunners of still greater centralization. The men who are employing their rare abilities in eliminating the useless wastes of competitive production, by unifying its administration and control, and so reducing greatly the cost of the finished article, and who are perfecting the machinery of transportation and distribution by like unity of administration, are doing far more in a year to bring about a co-operative organization of society than we could do, by preaching the theory of collectivism, in a hundred years. “The collectivist order of society may be distant, but, at least, we have this comfort--that the day of the old individualist, anarchical order is past. We can never return to it. The centralization of capital has proved the inadequacy of all that, in the present stage of progress. We have no choice but to go on to further centralization, and the logical outcome must be eventually, not the monopoly of everything by a few, but the common ownership of all land and capital by all the people.” * * * * * It was in the middle of the next morning that I chanced to meet, in the thick of a sweat-shop region of the West Side, an old acquaintance of the Socialist meetings. “The Unionist” I shall call him, for he had much to do with organizing the workers in sweat-shops into labor-unions. A victim of the sweaters himself, earning his living at a sewing-machine in a densely crowded shop, he yet managed to get about among the other victims and further their organization. More than once he had taken me with him on his rounds, and I had grown familiar with the sight of rooms, in all the poorer sections of the city where the rent is relatively low, turned into factories on a small scale for the manufacture of ready-made garments. And this idea of miniature factories is really the key to the situation. The industry of ready-made clothing is an enormous one, involving millions of dollars of invested capital, and competition among the merchants is very keen. The difference of a fraction of a cent in the cost of production, by the piece, of a given garment may mean the difference between profit and loss in the whole output. Cheapness of production is, therefore, of the first necessity.