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.
Mr. John C. Spooner, once a United States Senator from Wisconsin, but, happily, no longer such, feels particularly aggrieved at the Socialist proposals commonly known as the initiative, the referendum and the recall. To engraft these measures upon our federal and state constitutions would, he says, be an attempt to bring about a “pure democracy,” meaning thereby a community the members of which directly governed themselves. A “pure democracy,” according to Mr. Spooner, was never made to work on a great scale and cannot be made to work to-day.
Mr. Spooner, who, in and out of office, has always served the rich, is evidently still true to his allegiance. If Mr. Spooner does not know that no Socialist, nor any other person fit to be out of an idiot asylum, has ever even suggested that the government of the United States be converted into a pure democracy, the sum of his knowledge is even less than the sum of his public services up to date. Socialists, and those who have followed us in advocating the initiative, the referendum and the recall merely want to give the people power to do certain things for themselves, provided their elected representatives refuse to do them.
We do not propose to do away with representative government. We do not propose to disband a single legislative body. But we do propose to make every elected official represent us. We do not care whether he be a judge, a congressman or a President. He must represent us. But merely because we are determined these gentlemen shall represent us, other gentlemen like Mr. Spooner seek to make the people believe we are trying to go back to the old New England town meeting days and collect 90,000,0000 people on the prairie somewhere every time a law is to be passed or a fourth-class postmaster appointed. The most charitable construction that can be placed upon the attitude of Mr. Spooner and men of his kind is that they are infinitely more foolish than they believe Socialists to be.
Another point of view is suggested by a Denver gentleman whose letter follows:
“In one of your articles on Socialism, you tell how Socialists would govern—changes they would make in the constitution, and so forth. I should like to ask what you Socialists, or your ancestors had to do with making our present form of government? In other words, what percentage of the Socialists have three generations of American-born ancestors? Socialist leaders, in particular? A very small percentage, I venture to say. Socialism is a result of immigration. Americans still have faith in the constitution of the United States.”
When all other attacks fail, the charge is gravely made that “Socialism is un-American” and, therefore, a “result of immigration.”
Does it never occur to these gentlemen that the United States are also the “result of immigration”? That the English language, as we speak it here, is the result of immigration?