WHY SOCIALISTS PREACH DISCONTENT
Rich men tell poor men to beware of Socialism because Socialists preach
discontent. Rich men also tell poor men to beware of Socialism because
Socialists “preach the class struggle,” and try to “array class against
class,” politically.
It is all true. Socialists do these things. They make no bones about
doing them. They say they would feel ashamed of themselves if they did
not do them. If they had a thousand times the power they have, they
would do these things a thousand times harder than they do. Just so
rapidly as they gain power, they are doing these things harder.
What is it that they do? Let us see.
Socialists preach discontent. Discontent with what? Discontent with
home? Discontent with children? Discontent with friends? Discontent with
honest labor? Discontent with ambition? Discontent with life as a whole?
Why, nothing of the kind.
_Socialists preach discontent only with poverty that is made by robbery,
and the ills that follow in its wake._
The Hon. Charles Russell, of England, said in 1912 that 12,000,000 of
England’s 45,000,000 population were on the verge of starvation—shall we
be satisfied with that?
A recent investigation into the causes of the shockingly high rate of
infant mortality in Germany[1] shows that “the children of poverty
hunger before they are born. They come into the world ill-developed,
weaker than the children of plenty, and with such low resistant powers
that infant mortality rages in their ranks like an epidemic.” Shall we
be satisfied with that?
Footnote 1:
“The Proletarian Child,” by Albert Langon, published in Berlin.
Here in the United States millions of men cannot get work, while
millions of men, women and children are compelled to work for starvation
wages. Shall we be satisfied with that?
The census reports show that most people do not own the roofs over their
heads, having nothing but the clothes upon their backs and their meager
furniture. Shall we be satisfied with that?
We are creating wealth rapidly, but what we make is concentrating into
so few hands that a few men hold us as in the hollow of their hands,
telling us whether we may work, telling us what wages we shall receive
if we work, telling us how much we shall pay for meat, sugar, lumber,
clothing, salt and steel. Shall we be satisfied with that?
The Stanley Steel Committee’s investigations showed that, by a system of
interlocking directorates, eighteen men control thirty-five billions of
industrial property—a third of the entire national wealth. Shall we be
satisfied with that?
In times of industrial depression more than 5,000,000 men who want to
work are refused the right to do so, because the few men who control
everything cannot see a profit for themselves in letting 5,000,000 men
work to support themselves. Shall we be satisfied with that?
The cost of living, mounting higher and higher, is crowding an
increasing number of unorganized workers into the bottomless pit in
which men, women and children suffer the tortures of hell. Shall we be
satisfied with that?
Mr. Morgan, with the tremendous money-power that is behind him, is a
greater power in this country than the President of the United States,
or the Congress of the United States. Shall we be satisfied with that?
Some gentlemen are satisfied with these facts, but Socialists are not.
They are preaching discontent. Should we not be worthy of your scorn and
contempt if we did not preach discontent? If such discontent is wrong,
contentment with the facts against which Socialists cry out must be
right. Who has both the candor and the effrontery to say that
contentment with such facts is right? Should we be contented with the
woolen mill owners of New England who, fattening upon high Republican
tariffs, starve men, women and little children with low wages? Should we
be contented with the cotton-mill owners of the South, who, under the
protection of Democratic state administrations, fill both their mills
and the graveyards with little children? Should we be contented with a
world in which a few own everything and the rest do everything—a world
in which the worker is but a fleeing fugitive from inevitable fate,
owning neither his job, nor the roof over his head?
The cry of this wronged worker has come down through the ages, but never
was his hold upon the means of life so slight as it is to-day.
“Every creature has a home home—
But thou, oh workingman, hast none.”
So Shelley sang before machinery came. And, oh, the truth of it—the
truth of it still! And the pity of it! In these days the inexcusability
of it! Yet when we Socialists cry out against it—when we try to awaken
the workingman to a realization that a new world was born when the steam
engine was born, and that this new world may be and should be for him—we
are rebuked by the capitalists because we are “preaching discontent.”
Of course we are preaching discontent. We are going to preach it, if
present conditions persist, so long as we have breath with which to
preach. We respectfully decline to permit capitalists, as such, to tell
us what we may or may not preach. We preach what we please without their
leave. They preach what they please without our leave. At intervals,
they preach a good deal, through some of the magazines, about religion.
Big capital is behind the “Men and Religion Forward” movement, and some
other similar movements. These gentlemen who are living in luxury off
what they take from us tell us to take religion from them in the
magazines and be happy. “In the sweet by and by” we are to get our own,
while they get their own now. Socialists are willing to stand in on all
of the sweet by and by they can get by and by, but they are also
determined to make a prodigious fight for the sweet here and now.
Socialists regard poverty, in this day, as nothing less than a scandal.
Before the age of machinery there was reason for some poverty. Now there
is none. We can make all the wealth we need and more. We could cut our
workday in two and still make all we need. Yet poverty is scourging the
world as wars never scourged it. In Germany, England, the United
States—wherever capitalism has reached a high state of development—men,
women and children are pursued to the grave by poverty or the fear of
poverty.
Some gentlemen believe this is all right. They believe this is as it
should be. With such gentlemen Socialists do not hope to make headway.
With such gentlemen Socialists do not seek to make headway. They belong
to the rich class who are grafting off the working class. From them
Socialists expect no quarter, nor will they give any. The conflict must
go to a finish. There will be no surrender upon the part of the
Socialists. The Socialist party will never fuse with any of their
parties. If the Socialist party were standing still, instead of going
ahead, it would stand still alone for a thousand years before it would
go a foot with any capitalist party.
Make no mistake. This is all true. You saw the Greenback party wither
and blow away. You saw the Populist party swallowed by the Democratic
party. But you will never see the Socialist party wither, nor will you
ever see it swallowed. Its members are not composed of material that
withers or fuses. Right or wrong, they are actuated by the highest ideal
that can move a human being—the ideal of human justice. And they are
going down the line on their ideal, regardless of the length of the line
or of the obstructions that may be placed in their way. After a man has
seen Socialism, he can never thereafter defend capitalism. That is to
say, he cannot if he is honest. Two or three out of a million are not.
Such persons, not infrequently, are hired by capitalists to “expose”
Socialism.
But while Socialists do not hope to make any progress among the rich,
they do hope to make progress among the working class. Again, I must
explain that Socialists do not consider the working class to be
exclusively composed of those who wear overalls. Socialists include in
the working class all of those who do useful labor. It matters not
whether such labor be done by the digger in the ditch or by the general
superintendent of a railroad. Socialists place all of those who do
useful labor in the working class. Workers are creators of wealth.
Creators of wealth differ from capitalists in this: workers make;
capitalists take. Capitalists are profit-seekers. The small merchant
takes a profit, but it is not the kind of a profit that the big
capitalist takes. The small merchant’s profit represents only his labor,
and is, therefore, really wages. The big capitalist’s profits represent
no sort of labor. It is such profits that set capitalists and workers at
war, because the profits come out of the workers. Socialists call this
war the class struggle.
Socialists are opposed to class war. Socialists believe there should be
no classes. There would be no classes if everybody worked at useful
labor and took no more than belonged to him. But if some men will not
work at useful labor, choosing, instead, to make war upon those who are
working, who is to blame? Certainly not the workers. They are trying to
get nothing that belongs to anyone else. They have never yet been able
to keep what belonged to them.
Socialists recognize these facts. They say a class struggle is in
progress. Anybody who denies their statement must necessarily know
nothing of the existence of trusts, labor unions, courts, lobbyists,
crooked legislators, millionaires, paupers, overworked workers, or men
who are underworked because they can get no work. Anyone who recognizes
the existence of these things cannot well deny either the existence of
classes or the existence of a struggle. The dead of this warfare are
upon every industrial battlefield, where the fierce desire for profits
sends workers to their doom for lack of the safeguards that would have
saved their lives. The wounded are in every poverty-stricken home.
Either these statements are true or they are not. If they are true, is
it wiser to recognize their truth, or, ostrich-like, to stick our heads
in the sand and deny both the existence of classes and the class
struggle? Socialists believe it is wiser to recognize the existence of
the facts. They deplore the existence of the class struggle, but they
can see only harm in closing our eyes to it. If their contention is
correct a small body of capitalists are robbing the great working class.
If the working class has not found out who is robbing it it cannot find
out too quickly. Nor can the working class find out too quickly the
methods by which it is being robbed.
It is the advocacy of these ideas that has caused the Socialists to be
censured by the rich for trying to “array class against class.” If one
class is being robbed by another ought not the class that is being
robbed to be politically arrayed against the class that is robbing it?
Do we not array those whose houses are broken into by burglars against
the burglars? Is not the existence of police forces sufficient proof
that we do? If capitalists, working through laws they have made, are
robbing the workers of thousands, where burglars take cents, why should
not the workers be politically arrayed against the capitalists even more
solidly than they are arrayed against burglars?
The workers, either singly or collectively, as in their unions, are
already arrayed against the capitalists, so far as fighting for more
wages is concerned. Without any help from Socialists, we thus have here
class arrayed against class. Socialists seek only to extend this
conflict to the ballot-box. They ask the worker to remember when he
votes as well as when he strikes that he belongs to the working class.
They point out to him that he is robbed under the forms of law and that
the robbery cannot be stopped until the operations of capitalist laws
are stopped. The operations of capitalist laws cannot be stopped until
working men stop them. Working men can stop them only by uniting at the
ballot-box and wresting from the capitalist class the control of the
government.
In this way only do Socialists try to “array class against class.” They
do not try to array men against men. They do not try to engender hatred
of Mr. Morgan, Mr. Rockefeller, or any other great capitalist.
Socialists have nothing against any rich man individually. They regard
all great capitalists as the natural and inevitable products of the
capitalist system. If the great capitalists are sometimes bad, it is
because the capitalist system makes them bad. If the particular
capitalists who are bad had never been born, the capitalist system would
have made others do the same bad acts. Therefore Socialists are opposed
to the system that makes man bad rather than to the men who have been
made bad by the system. If every capitalist in the world had gone down
with the _Titanic_, Socialists would have expected absolutely no
improvement in conditions, because the capitalist system would still
have remained. Other men would simply have taken their places, and the
wrongs would have gone on. Therefore, Socialists leave it to Democratic
and Republican politicians to point out “bad men” and say if this man or
that man were in jail we should have no more robbery. The slightest
reflection should reveal the fallacious character of such comment. Where
are all of the “bad men” of the last two generations? Where are William
H. Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, E. H. Harriman and the others? They are not
simply in jail—they are dead. But who noticed the slightest abatement of
robbery when they died? Who will note the slightest improvement of
conditions when the “bad men” of the present day are dead? Then how
ridiculous it is to say that if Mr. Morgan, Mr. Rockefeller and some
others were in jail we should have no more robbery. So long as we have a
system that makes men bad we shall have bad men.
Let us now inquire what it is about the capitalist system that makes men
bad. We shall not have far to look. It is the private ownership and
control, for the sake of private profits, of the means of life. Think
how gigantic is this power! All of our food, clothing and shelter is
made with machinery. A few own the machinery. The others cannot use it
without permission. And, if permission be given, it can be used only
upon such terms as the owners offer. Those terms are always the lowest
wages for which anybody can be found to work.
Is it any wonder that the few who control this machinery go mad with the
desire to accumulate wealth? Is it any wonder that they press their
advantage to the limit? Are you sure you would have done less if you had
been placed in the same circumstances? I am not sure I should have done
less. In fact, I am quite sure I should have done as much, or more, if I
could. I say this because I take into account the tremendous power of
habit and environment.
An environment of money makes those whom it surrounds forget men. The
_Titanic_ was not raced through icebergs to her doom because her owners
were indifferent to the loss of human life. The _Titanic_ was raced to
her doom because her owners _forgot_ human life. They thought only of
the money that would come from the advertisement of a quick trip across
the Atlantic. If they had not been made mad by this thought they would
at least have remembered their ship, with its cost of $8,000,000. But in
their money-madness they forgot not only their passengers, but their own
ship. Yet, if the manager of the company had been sailing the ship for
the government, without thought of profit, he would have thought of the
passengers, the crew, the ship and the icebergs. And if the trusts were
owned by the government, the men in charge of them would think of the
workers when they fixed wages and of the consumers when they fixed the
prices of finished products.
So easy is it to dispose of the argument that Socialism is impracticable
because it could not be made to work “without changing human nature.”
Some men believe we must forever go on grabbing, grabbing, grabbing,
while others go on starving, starving, starving. Human nature will
“change” just so rapidly as conditions are changed. If one sits on a
red-hot stove, it is “human nature” to arise. But if the stove be
permitted to cool, one who sits on it will not arise until other reasons
than heat have made him wish to do so. Yet, the human nature of the man
in each case is the same. It has in no wise changed. It is only the
stove that has changed.
Precisely so will the actions of men change when the production of the
necessities of life by the government has demonstrated that no one need
ever fear the lack of the means with which to live. The very knowledge
that the stomach is taken for granted—that with free opportunity to
labor, the material necessities and comforts of life are as assured as
the air itself—will destroy the incentive to accumulate more wealth than
is needed. Even the richest now consume and waste but a fraction of the
wealth they possess. Yet they are spurred on to seek still further
accumulations, because it is only so recently, comparatively, that the
whole race was fighting for the means of life, that the madness for
money is still in the air.
The madness for money will not always be in the air. Human nature is
wonderfully adaptive. As soon as the workers take control of the
government for the benefit of their class, and demonstrate the perfect
ease with which enough wealth can be produced to enable everybody to
live as well as the $5,000 a year man now lives, the scramble for wealth
will quickly subside. It will not subside instantly, but it will
subside. A few may grumble, as their industries are bought and taken
over by the government, but they will have to take it out in grumbling.
They will not even have to work if they don’t want to. They will have
enough money obtained from the sale of their plants to enable them to
live without working. But none of their successors will ever be able to
live without working, because no opportunity will exist for anyone to
obtain the products of another’s labor. Goods will be made and sold by
the government at cost. No capitalist will stand between producers and
consumers. The people will be their own capitalists, owning their own
industrial machinery and managing it through the government.
Those who are opposed to Socialism ask what assurance we have that,
under Socialism, the people would be able to manage their government.
Others ask why we should not be as likely to have grafters in office
under Socialist government as we are now under Democratic or Republican
government? Still others believe that a Socialist government would
inevitably become tyrannical and despotic, destroying all individual
liberty and eventually bringing down civilization in a heap.
Let us answer these objections one by one. And let us first inquire why
the people are not now able to manage and control their government.
In the first place, our form of government does not permit the people to
control it. The rich men who made our constitution—and they were rich
for their day; not a working man among them—purposely made a
constitution under which nothing could be done to which the rich might
object. That is why the United States senate was created. It was frankly
declared in the constitutional convention that the senate was intended
to represent wealth. The house of representatives was to represent the
people, but the senate was to represent wealth, and the house of
representatives could enact no legislation without the consent of the
senate. Moreover, the United States supreme court, over which the people
have absolutely no control, was created to construe the laws made by
congress.
That is the first reason why the people do not now control their
government—the framers of the constitution did not intend that they
should control it, and the rich men of our day are taking advantage of
their opportunity to control it themselves. The second reason is that
the capitalist system, based, as it is, upon private profits, makes it
highly profitable for the capitalist class to control the government.
The robberies of capitalism are committed through laws, and control of
the government is necessary to obtain and maintain the laws.
Socialists would abolish the senate, thus vesting the entire legislative
power in the house of representatives. They would take from the
President the power to appoint justices of the supreme court, and give
the people the right to elect all judges. They would take from the
United States supreme court the usurped power to declare acts of
congress unconstitutional, and give to the people the power to say what
acts of congress should be set aside. They would make the constitution
of the United States amendable by majority vote, and they would make
every public official in the country, from President down, subject to
immediate recall at any time, by the vote of the people.
Socialists respectfully offer these reasons, among others, for believing
that under Socialism, the people would be able to control their
government. Another reason is that, under Socialism, there would be no
trust senators or representatives, no representatives of great private
banking interests or other aggregations of private capital, because
there would be no such private interests.
The reasons are equally plain why, under Socialism, we should not be as
certain to have Socialist grafters in office as we are now to have
Democratic and Republican grafters. But not one of these reasons is that
Socialists believe themselves to be more nearly honest than anyone else.
Socialists have no such delusion. Socialists simply point to the fact
that all of the present grafting is to secure private profits. When the
profit system is abolished, and goods are made for use instead of for
profit, nothing will be left to graft for. Public officials could still
steal, of course; they could falsify pay-rolls, and probably in many
other ways rob the people. But, in the first place, public officials now
do little of this sort of clumsy stealing, and, in the second place,
whatever stealing of this sort that may be done under Socialism will be
punished in precisely the same way that it now is, except more
vigorously. Moreover, Socialists do not believe there will be much such
stealing, or that it will long continue. And so far as grafting is
concerned, when the private profit system that makes grafting is
abolished, grafting will be abolished along with it.
Let us now examine the charge that a Socialist government would become
tyrannical, despotic, destroy individual liberty, and thus destroy
civilization itself.
With all legislative power vested in the house of representatives which
is elected by the people, all judges elected by the people and the
United States supreme court shorn of its usurped power to declare laws
unconstitutional, it is difficult to see how the government could become
tyrannical. It is still more difficult when it is considered that, under
the Socialist government, the people would have these additional powers:
The power to recall, at any time, any official.
The power to enact, by direct vote, any laws that their legislative
bodies might refuse to enact.
The power, by direct vote, to repeal any law that their legislative
bodies had enacted.
And the power, by direct vote, to amend their constitutions, both
federal and state, any time they wished to do so.
If there could be any tyranny or despotism under such a form of
government, gentlemen who profess to believe so are entitled to make the
most of it.
Many good persons believe, however, that if Socialism were to come, all
individual liberty would be lost. Such persons lack, not only a
knowledge of Socialist plans, but a sense of humor. They assume that we
now have individual liberty. They do not seem to realize that the
average boy, as soon as he is old enough to work, if not before, is
grabbed off by necessity and chucked into the nearest job at hand. The
boy may have preferred to work at something else; perhaps even he is
better fitted for something else. But the pinch of necessity both
compels him to work and to take what he can find. He may rattle around
in two or three occupations before he finds one in which he stays for
life, but the other occupations, like the first one, are not of his
choosing. He takes each of them simply because he must have work.
If Socialism would enable the head of every family to earn as good a
living as the $5,000–a-year man now gets, the head of no family would be
compelled to send his children out to work until they had completed, at
least, the high school course. If boys were not compelled to go to work
so young, does it not seem likely that, with added years, they would be
better able to choose an occupation that would be more nearly suited
both to their tastes and their abilities? And if we should destroy the
power of poverty to push boys into the occupation nearest to them,
should we be justly subject to the charge that we had destroyed, or even
impaired, the boys’ individual liberty?
Persons who derive their knowledge of Socialism from capitalist sources
have strange, and sometimes awful, ideas of what Socialism is setting
out to do. They are told, and many of them believe, that under
Socialism, the individual would be a mere puppet in the hands of the
government, not arising in the morning until the ringing of the
governmental alarm clock, doing during the day whatever odd jobs might
be assigned to him by a governmental boss, and going to bed at night
when the boss told him to.
Suppose we shake up this trash and let the wind blow through it.
Who would thus tyrannize over the people? “The Socialists,” it is
answered. But who, at that time, will the Socialists be? They will
constitute at least a majority of the people, will they not? The
Socialists will never gain control of the government until they become a
majority—the Milwaukee coalition plan of the old capitalist parties can
be depended upon to prevent that. Then what you are asked to believe is
that a majority of the people will deliberately go about it to create
and afterwards maintain a form of government and industry under which
the majority as well as the minority will be slaves.
Remember this: Socialism will never do anything that at least a majority
of the people do not want done. This is not a promise, it is fact. A
Socialist administration could do nothing to which a majority of the
people objected. If such an act were attempted, the majority would
instantly recall the administration, wipe out its laws, and assert its
own will.
And, also, remember this: If the Socialists, after the next election,
were to control every department of the government there would be no
upheaval, no paralysis of industry. Everybody would go to work the next
morning at his accustomed task. The business of socializing industry
would proceed in an orderly, deliberate manner. One industry at a time
would be taken over. Perhaps the railroads would be taken over first. A
year might be required to take them over. But not a wheel would stop
turning while the laws were being changed.
Gentlemen who talk about the blotting out of individual liberty under a
Socialist government make this fatal mistake. They assume that a
minority would control a Socialist government, precisely as a minority
now controls this government. And having made this error they naturally
easily proceed to the next error—the assumption that if Socialists were
to establish such a crazy government, they would not suffer from it as
much as anyone else, and, therefore, would maintain it against the will
of the others.
There is absolutely no foundation for this
“tyranny-loss-of-individual-liberty” charge. A government controlled by
the people cannot tyrannize over the people, nor can the abolition of
poverty curtail, under democratic government, the individual liberties
of the people. Who now has the most individual liberty—the man who is
poverty-stricken or the man who isn’t?
Yet Socialists make no pretense of a purpose to create a world in which
the worker may blithely amble up to the governmental employment office
and demand a job picking a guitar. The worker may amble and demand, but
he will not get the job unless there is a guitar to pick. In other
words, Socialists expect to exercise ordinary common sense in the
conduct of industry. Broadly speaking, the man who is best fitted to do
certain work will be given that work to do. It would be absurd to plan
or promise anything else. At the same time, the destruction of poverty,
and the multiplication of the mass of manufactured goods that will
follow the satisfaction of all of the people’s needs, will give the
workers greater freedom in exercising their discretion in the choice of
an occupation.
At this point in the proceedings somebody always inquires, “Who will do
the dirty work?”
Socialists do not expect ever to make the cleaning of sewers as pleasant
as the packing of geraniums. They do expect, however, to offer such
extraordinarily good compensation for this extraordinarily unpleasant
work that the sewers will be cleaned. Why should anyone expect that plan
to fail, since the present plan does not fail? We now offer very poor
wages for this very unpleasant work, yet the sewers do not go uncleaned.
Is it to be supposed that the same men who are now doing this dirty work
for low wages would refuse to do it for high wages? Most certainly the
government would be compelled to offer wages high enough to get the
dirty, but important, work done. It is lack of work that now makes men
take dirty work at dirty wages. Under Socialism there can be no lack of
work, because the people will own their own industrial machinery and
will be free to use it. Furthermore, machinery is now doing much of the
dirty work, and, as time goes on, will do more of it.
Socialists are often asked what they will do with the man who will not
work. If facetiously inclined, they usually reply that one thing they
will certainly not do with him is to make him a millionaire. But,
really, the question is absurd. What do the opponents of Socialism
believe a Socialist government would do with the man who would not work?
Do they believe such a man would be given a hero medal, or be pensioned
for life? What is there to do with such a man, but to let him starve? I
mean a man having the ability to work and having work offered to him,
who would nevertheless refuse to work.
But, outside the ranks of criminals, there is no such man, nor will
there ever be. Socialists would punish thieves precisely as capitalists
punish them, except for the fact that Socialists would not discriminate
in favor of the biggest thieves. To answer the question in a single
sentence, Socialists would depend upon the spurs afforded by the desires
for food, clothing and shelter, to keep most of the people at work, and
the odd man who might choose to steal would be treated in the ordinary
way—imprisoned.
But the question, “What will you do with the man who will not work?”
reveals a strange belief that is held by those who do not hold much of a
clutch upon the facts of life. I have a very dear old aunt who believes
from the bottom of her honest heart that the great mass of unemployed
are either drunkards or loafers. In discussing the problem of the
unemployed with gentlemen who are living upon the sunny side of the
street, they almost invariably fire this question, “Why don’t those
fellows get out into the country where the farmers are crying for help
and can’t get any?”
I was brought up on a farm, and I still remember that not much farming
was done in winter. The great demand for extra help comes in mid-summer,
when the crops are harvested. During six or eight weeks there is a
demand from the farms for more help than they can get. But what man who
has a family in the tenements of New York or Chicago can afford to pay
his railroad fare to Iowa, Nebraska, or even Ohio, to get six weeks’
work?
In the first place, they have not the money with which to pay their
fare. These men live from hand to mouth in the city, running in debt
during the week, and paying their debt with the wages they receive
Saturday night. If their fares were advanced by the farmers who wanted
to hire them they would have little or nothing left from what they might
earn on the farms, and, in the meantime, their families in the cities
would be starving. Furthermore, farm-work is a trade of which these city
workers know nothing. They could learn the trade of farming, of course,
but they could not learn it in six weeks. At any rate, in panic times
there are more than 5,000,000 out of work in this country, and in no
conceivable circumstances is it possible that any considerable part of
this number could find work upon the farms even six weeks of the year.
The fact is that the conditions of modern industrial life are so hard
that an increasing number of unorganized workers are barely able to
live, even when they work. The constantly increasing cost of living,
brought about by the trusts through their control of markets and prices,
robs these men to the limit, and they have no labor unions to increase
their wages. Still, they do not refuse to work, even for a bare,
miserable living. On the contrary, they are eager to work. So are the
great bulk of the unemployed eager to work for a miserable living.
If, under these horrible conditions, men are willing to work, what
reason have we to suppose that any great number would refuse to work
under a Socialist government for compensation that would enable each of
them to live as well as the $5,000–a-year man now lives? Gentlemen who
want to worry about this may worry about it. Socialists are not
worrying. If, under Socialism, a few dyed-in-the-wool loafers should
appear, Socialists are prepared to deal with them. They do not propose
to cease their attempts to rid the world of poverty, merely because of
the possibility of the appearance of an occasional loafer.