I am in favor of Socialism because I believe that Socialism in operation means the emancipation of the human race. It is idle to talk about political liberty while the vast majority of the people are without industrial liberty. The man who owns a thousand jobs, owns a thousand lives. Such a statement may sound harsh and brutal to the man whose cradle has been rocked beneath the starry banner of young Columbia, and he may say to me, "I am not a slave for I can quit the owner of the job," but if he quits the owner of the job and he belongs to the disinherited class, the wage earning class, then necessity demands that he shall seek another owner of jobs, and he has merely changed masters and he is still a slave.
For men to be free, they must own their jobs, and to own the jobs the people must own collectively, the natural resources of the earth, and its machinery of production and distribution.
I am in favor of Socialism because collective ownership of the earth and its machines of production and distribution will open wide the gates of equal opportunity to every man, woman and child who live upon the face of the earth. Socialism means that the profit system shall be destroyed and that upon its shattered ruins shall be built a real republic, beneath whose sheltering dome, there can live no master and no slave.
James, W.E.S., M.A., B.D. (Clergyman, Ayr, Ont., Canada.)
Socialism is the scientific analysis of the present state of society and the theory of social development founded thereon. A Socialist is one whose study of this scientific analysis has convinced him that society is progressing towards a co-operative commonwealth. My study extends over fifteen years, and I clearly see the gradual concentration of capital—the gradual consolidation of labor interests and the life and death struggle between them. As no question is ever settled until it is settled right, this can have only one result—the capturing of the wealth of the nations by the producers of wealth and the utilizing of it, not for the few, but for the whole people.
With the passing of the small privately owned shop through the coming of the large manufactury, socially operated but privately owned, way was prepared for the larger, nation-wide manufactury, socially operated and socially owned. It must come.
As right has behind it all the power of omnipotence and so must prevail the present system, which makes the many toil in poverty while the few live on the earnings in idleness and luxury, must make way for a system which will provide a more equitable reward of labor.
As competition is based on man's selfishness and so is un-Christian, co-operation, based on man's brotherhood, the essence of Christianity, must supersede it.
The capitalistic system must consider profits first—business must pay—and men second. The last hundred years has traced the gradual rise of man and the next twenty-five will see him freeing himself from this system of wage slavery and evolving another which will dethrone the dollar and will enthrone the rights of man.