Mr. Taft was asked in the campaign what a workless, homeless man could do to find employment.
"God knows!" was his reply.
Out of this army of the unemployed the ranks of the criminals are reinforced, and the search for creature comforts recruits the ranks of women who are not fallen, but knocked down. The supreme function of the state is to make it easy for citizens to live in harmony with one another and hard to be out of joint.
Poverty is the mother curse of the ages. No man suffering from her withering, blighting touch can be in harmony with the best. Socialism tackles the master job of abolishing it. Not by any fantastic plan of redistribution but by giving to the creator all that he creates and to the social charges, pensioners and cripples an assurance of life without the stigma of pauperism.
Socialism asks for the application of science to the disease of poverty. Science has chained the lightning and harnessed the ether waves, it has filled the world with horseless carriages and is now filling the air with machines that fly like birds. The inventions of the last twenty years are modern miracles but the sunken millions of our fellowmen never speak through a telephone, never ride in an automobile, never send a telegram, never read good books, or see good plays! They make all these things. They make them all possible for others, but the enjoyment of them is beyond their wildest dreams!
The strength of the social chain cannot be greater than its weakest link.
Socialists are grouped around the thin places, the leakages, the weaknesses of democracy, and engross themselves in making them strong. The propaganda in times past wielded only a sword; now it has a trowel. Socialism is a positive force; it is leaven in the lump.
The party has a discipline which often hampers its own progress, but in the regimentation of an idea discipline can not be dispensed with. There are Socialists who see only the goal—are not willing to see anything else or less. There are others who see every step of the way and emphasize each step.
"What kind of a Socialist are you?" a rich man asked me the other day.
"Catalogue me with the worst!" I said, "for he who numbers himself with the transgressors is in direct apostolic succession."