Therefore: All Socialists want to destroy the home. The logic of this is bad enough, but even the premiss is false. Deville is no longer a Socialist; and if he does want to destroy the home, no one that I know of in America wants him back in the fold.
In exactly the same manner our ex-Presidential logician argues regarding divorce:
Herron divorced;
Herron is a Socialist;
Therefore: All Socialists divorce. Herron was divorced in 1901. He is the only leading Socialist who has divorced during twenty years to Mr. Roosevelt's knowledge or to mine. Whereas, during that time here are the statistics of divorces for the United States:
Total number of marriages 1887-1906, 12,832,044
Total number of divorces 1887-1906, 945,625 or about one in 12,[16] in all of which the majority of the men presumably voted for Mr. Roosevelt.
Can anyone who knows the family life of Socialists assert that the divorce rate among them is greater than that of the community in which they live?
Again, the pretence that the American home to-day is one which a capitalist like Mr. Roosevelt can hold up to the admiration of the world will not stand scrutiny.
Where there is wealth for leisure, there we find immorality enthroned as a vice; and where there is no leisure, there we find immorality imposed as a necessity. Are the filthy tenements and promiscuous lodgings of the congested districts in our large cities the homes to which Mr. Roosevelt is fearful that Socialism will put an end?[17] Or is it the so-called She-towns in New England from which men are driven because there is no employment in them for any save women and children?[18] Or the lumber camps to which these men are driven where there is no employment for women?[19] Or the home of the unemployed to which the bread-winner has returned day after day for two years now, seeking employment and finding none—guilty of no crime save that no man has hired him? Thousands—nay, hundreds of thousands of such so-called homes are scattered over the face of this land which Mr. Roosevelt has during seven years administered.