Whitaker, Robert. (Clergyman and Editor.)
I am in favor of Socialism because I see no other way out of the world-wide social distress which afflicts all the industrial nations today. Capitalism has outlived its historic function, and is today a cause of intolerable oppression, immeasurable misery and irrepressible conflict. The whole order of things by which society exists for the exploitation of the many by the few, either through competition or private monopoly, is fundamentally awry, and must be superseded by an order which shall give us the largest measure of practicable co-operation for ends of common service. There can be no real or lasting peace between capital and labor until society recognizes the common rights of all in natural resources, until we meet the marvelous multiplication of human effort through mechanical invention with social ownership and democratic control of the machine, and until the whole industrial order is organized so as to eliminate the waste of competition not in the interest of a few great industrial barons, but in the interest of the whole body of laborers. This is the program of Socialism in a large way, a system of social service as against a system of private profit, of co-operation as against exploitation, whose threefold objective is to make every man a partner with every other man in the commonwealth of nature, in the common gain of the world's inventive genius which is fundamentally social and not individual in its origin, and in the organization of industrial life, which ought to be democratic and not autocratic or oligarchic in its end.
I am for Socialism because Socialism is the economic expression of both democracy and religion, and because as such it is as inevitable as the movement of the suns.
If Socialism means the adjustment of social conditions of the past to the industrial and commercial needs of the present or some future day; if its objects are the utilization of natural forces, inventions and discoveries, for the benefit, not of the few, but for the greatest number—I am thoroughly in favor of Socialism.
Or, if Socialism stands for an endeavor to improve all things human, to attack all the hostile forces that threaten human well-being, such as hunger, sickness, ignorance, etc.—I, again, am in favor of Socialism or any "ism" that will try to make this world a happy abode of human beings.
But, if Socialism should stand for upheaval by force instead of peaceable evolution; if it should appeal to class hatred nurtured by envy; if it should endeavor to realize dreams of an impossible economic equality by means of the ballot or nitro-glycerine—in that case I am not in favor of Socialism.
Show me your Socialism, and I will tell you whether I am in favor of it or not.