As a matter of fact, no decent home is possible for the majority of our fellow citizens so long as they are called upon to support it at present prices on present wages. All this will, I think, be made clear in the description of industrial conditions. Suffice it to say here that these conditions furnish a few luxurious and often licentious homes for the propertied class and a few comfortable and moral homes for the aristocracy of the working class, but leave a vast number of our families so nearly upon the edge of poverty as to drive their daughters to prostitution and their sons to crime.
§ 5. Socialism Will not Abolish Property
Another charge made by Mr. Roosevelt is that Socialists propose to abolish property and distribute wealth. It has been repeated by both Mr. Taft and Mr. Bryan and is still being repeated ad nauseam by the press. Workingmen so absorbed by the making of bread that they have no time to discuss questions of government may be excused for being ignorant on such a point as this; to them ignorance cannot be imputed as a fault. But that those who set themselves up as the persons best fitted to govern and educate our country—as indeed the only persons in the country possessing the knowledge of statesmanship necessary to handle our governmental affairs and publish our daily press—should either never have taken the trouble to find out what Socialism is, or, having taken the trouble, should so traduce it, is a sad commentary upon our editors and statesmen.
Just as it has been demonstrated that Socialism is opposed to Anarchism, so can it be demonstrated that Socialism is opposed to the distribution of wealth or the abolition of property. Far from distributing wealth, the essence of Socialism is that it seeks to concentrate it. Far from wanting to abolish property Socialism seeks to put it on a throne. The question of property is so important that a special chapter has been devoted to it. I shall therefore only say here just enough to remove the error created by the misstatements current on the subject.
Property is not only the basis of our present civilization, but must be the basis of all conceivable civilizations. It may be said that not only all law, but all government, is founded upon it. Property was instituted to furnish to every industrious man security as regards himself, his family, and the means of their support; to protect him and them from theft, from fraud and evil doing.
Unfortunately property, like every human institution—even the best of them[20]—has been abused to serve the selfishness of the crafty; and there have arisen, therefore, notions and laws regarding property which have reversed the results which property was instituted to secure. Instead of making every industrious man secure as regards himself, his family, and the means of their support, it has actually deprived the majority of all security regarding these things and, indeed, put the majority as regards these things at the mercy of a very few. Not only this, it has created conditions which to-day are depriving several millions of us not only of all means of support, but of all opportunity of earning them.
The bourgeois' excuse for such conditions is that no better can be devised. Here is the whole issue of Socialism raised; for Socialism contends that these conditions are totally unnecessary; that it does not need any imagination or invention to substitute for them a system that will put an end to such evils as pauperism, prostitution, and, in great part, crime; that we have but to adopt as a community the principles already adopted by the men—the makers of the trusts—to whom the whole business world looks up as infallible on these subjects; and that this can be accomplished by ridding the institution of property of the fallacies with which it has been industriously defaced. Just indeed as the truly religious have during all ages sought to rescue religion from the crafty who tend to use it for their own ends—Christ from the Pharisee, Plato from the Sophist, Luther from the Borgias, so Socialists are now seeking to rescue property from the few who, under a mistaken theory of happiness, use property to injure their fellow creatures when these very few can attain happiness only by so using property as to benefit those they now injure.
It must, however, be specifically stated that Socialism does not involve the concentration of all wealth in the state. No sane Socialist proposes to vest in the state the things which a man uses, his personal apparel, his personal furniture, his objects of art, his musical instruments, his automobile, or even his private yacht.
There is no intention to suppress private property except so far as it is used for exploitation. Light is thrown upon this subject in another paragraph, which indicts the capitalist system for making the production of the necessaries of our lives the object of their competitive enterprises and speculations.
What the Socialist party proposes to do is not to abolish property, but to abolish the capitalist system, as it expressly states; and it proposes to do this not only in the interest of the proletariat, but also in the interest of the capitalist himself, who, to quote the words of the platform, is "the slave of his wealth rather than its master." The extent to which this last is true will be discussed in a subsequent chapter and ought to constitute an impressive argument for all—even millionaires—who have become the slaves of the very fortunes they have made. And the moral tendency to restore property to its original intention by abolishing the capitalist system is expressly stated in the platform as not an attempt "to substitute working-class rule for capitalist-class rule, but to free all humanity from class rule and to realize the international brotherhood of man." If this be immoral, then a great many of us do not know what morality is.