Society must advance by gradual evolution, as it has done since its beginning, and I believe that this ideal condition is still many generations, perhaps centuries, distant. The only way to strive for its realization is for each generation to do its part in promoting a spirit of temperance, co-operation, fairness and intellectuality. Society will then gradually realize the waste, unfairness and barbarism of industrial competition, of inheritance and of unequal distribution and consumption. While man is thus slowly becoming civilized, he will naturally devise from time to time, such laws and such forms of government as will fit each stage of his development.
Strobell, George H.
I work and vote for Socialism. Every age has its special problems, its special tyranny to combat, its own liberty and independence to preserve, to hand down to its descendants. The machine has destroyed hand labor and association in labor is inevitable. The machine, too large and complex to be owned by individuals, has made necessary combinations of owners. Combinations of owners destroyed competition, and, through resultant economy and increase of production and profit, became rich and powerful corporations. These corporations control the means of life of over nine-tenths of the people. The owners no longer are the administrators of their property. They hire the necessary business abilities to run the business machine, but they insistently demand higher dividends and profits. These demands cause the virtual slavery of the workers, and millions work today long hours at a speed and productive capacity never before known in the world, and get so little for it that they are hungry all the time, live in squalor and dress poorly. More and better machinery being constantly invented, turns loose on the labor market a host of unemployed to compete with their fellow workers for work. We are not the freeman our fathers were.
Fortunes so vast as to stagger the imagination for a few; dire, ever-increasing poverty for the masses is now and will be increasingly the result of this development unless—
Unless we look at it in the sane way, as a development toward a new order, where the people will, in their collective capacity, own and operate and democratically manage all industry. That will be Socialism. There is no other way of escape in sight. Socialism is not, however, inevitably the outcome. There must be conscious action by the people to turn this evolution away from its present tendency. To continue as we are is to invite the destruction of our civilization. Therefore I work and vote for Socialism. It is a step forward in the progress of the race and a promise of the fulfillment of the prayer, "Thy Kingdom come, on earth as it is in Heaven."
Kalley, Ella Hartwig. (Lecturer.)
I have long felt the need of a more humane form of government, a system of justice regulating international commercial relations, insuring peace and education for the older as well as the younger persons.
Our country should be a republic, industrially as well as politically, and liberate the wage slave by the abolition of the capitalist.