The building and loan associations afford another means of deposit for the savings of the worker, and, in 1911, the number of persons who held shares in and paid dues to such associations was nearly 2,200,000, the total assets of the societies being but a trifle less than one billion dollars.
If these facts are not sufficient, study the workers themselves; see how they live and how they spend their money, and then ask yourself if the Socialist is telling the truth when he says that this class of citizens do not share in the increasing prosperity of the nation.
The workers live far better to-day than the so-called middle class was able to live half a century ago. As Willey states (“Laborer and the Capitalist,” p. 190), there are servant girls at the present time who own jewelry that costs more money than our grandmothers could afford to spend for a wedding dress (quoted by Kress, “Questions of Socialists,” p. 22).
In addition to living under so much better conditions that most of the workers now enjoy luxuries that the so-called well-to-do could ill have afforded half a century ago, this class of citizens still manages to find money for several other things. For example, the immigrant workers succeed in saving enough out of their wages to send the vast sum of $300,000,000 to foreign countries every year, while the enormous sums spent by the workers each year in picture shows, candy and for drink in the saloons would be sufficient to start every homeless man in America upon the high road to the ownership of a home.
Talk about locks and bolts against the masses, John—bars to prevent them from enjoying the good things of life! Why, there would be none of these good things of life—no enjoyment, no freedom of any kind—under a system that placed a premium on laziness and saved its highest rewards for the bosses—and that is what Socialism would do!
CHAPTER XII
THE CLASS STRUGGLE
My dear John,
It is almost impossible to find a Socialist agitator who does not lay great stress upon the “class struggle.” I cannot remember having listened to a single one of these gentry who has not asserted that his “clear view of the economic situation” dates from the hour when he first became “class-conscious”; and I do not think that many Socialists will deny the statement that fully four-fifths of the militant propaganda is an attempt to arouse the workers to this sense of “class-consciousness.”
Of course, the Socialists want you to believe that the revolution they are preaching is really an evolutionary process by means of the ballot. But, as you must have noticed, John, their promise of peaceful methods is not borne out by the gospel of class-hatred which they preach under the name of “the class struggle.” It is “class war” that they are trying to incite; and in this, as one writer has said, “evolutionary Socialists closely rival, even if they do not always equal, the members of the revolutionary organizations.... No graver mistake, therefore, could be made in diagnosing Socialism than to regard evolutionary Socialists (so-called) as opposed to revolutionary methods. The whole gospel of the ‘class war’ as commonly preached by Socialists ... is a direct and malicious incitement to the ignorant to adopt revolutionary methods” (“A Case Against Socialism,” p. 101).
There are lots of things in Socialism that a man doesn’t have to believe in order to be a Socialist, but class-consciousness is not one of them. Before he can sign up, before he can get his red card, he must affix his signature to a document in which he admits that he recognizes the existence of a class struggle.