[328]. Fearing that the powerful suggestion might reach and rouse the slumbering working class the capitalist press of the world kept silent as an oyster on the behavior of the clear-visioned soldiers of Norway and Sweden. Only the working-class press properly reported the sublime event. (See Challenge, page 206 et seq.)
[329]. For an excellent and convenient discussion of the Socialist Party’s opposition to war and militarism, see Werner Sombart’s Socialism and the Socialist Movement, pp. 193–211; Morris Hillquit’s Socialism in Theory and Practice, pp. 296–302.
[330]. “It is no easy task to detect and follow the tiny paths of progress which the unencumbered proletarian with nothing but his life and capacity for labor is pointing out for us. These paths lead to a type of government founded upon peace and fellowship as contrasted with restraint and defence.... From the nature of the case, he who would walk these paths must walk with the poor and oppressed, and can only approach them through affection and understanding. The ideals of militarism would forever shut him out from this new fellowship.”—Miss Jane Addams, of Hull House, Chicago: Newer Ideals of Peace, p. 30.
[331]. The class who despise you so thoroughly that they would be willing to have you murdered on the battlefield—would these hesitate to tell you a lie? Certainly not. And they have lied to you about “different kinds of Socialism,” “Socialists don’t seem to know what they want,” etc., etc. But secretly the capitalists are worrying because they know that the Socialists of all the world do know what they want and also know how to organize the necessary power to get what they want.
[332]. Christianity and the Social Crisis, p. 350.
[333]. It is true that even before this time woman occupied a servile position and virtually constituted an industrial class. See August Bebel’s Woman—Past, Present and Future.
[334]. Professor E. A. Ross (Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin) gently hints thus (Social Control, p. 86):
“Under the ascendency of the rich and leisured, property becomes more sacred than persons, moral standards vary with the pecuniary status, and it is felt that ‘God will think twice before He damns a person of quality.’”
[335]. Even great literatures, regarded as divinely inspired and boasted to be The Truth, have been kept from the free access of the people—the “plain people,” too plain to understand the literature said to have life in it. Such literature has been hidden from the people for many hundreds of years—or “rightly divided” and diluted.
[336]. The inauguration of human slavery was a profound change in human relations—the greatest possible “change in circumstances”—down at the very foundations of society. Vast fundamental changes resulted—inevitably—in changed, and even new, institutions.