Our “altars” are the symbol of our religion. “No God, no master,” is the cry of the Socialists, and it was only after a prolonged debate that a repudiation of religion was kept out of the Socialist platform of 1908. Our “fires” are our homes and hearthstones. Socialism would destroy the home. The revolting doctrine of promiscuity was applauded, and applauded by young women of the faith, at a recent meeting of Socialists. “The green graves of your sires”—those words should remind us that the earliest form of title to land was the right to inclose the graves of parents and kindred. Socialism permits no private ownership of land. “God, and your native land”—Socialism denies the Creator and puts the red flag above the Stars and Stripes. Could the grim meaning of this hideous creed be brought more directly home to the minds and hearts of American youth than by the evidence that it is a cold-blooded negation of the fine and lofty patriotism of Halleck’s adjuration?
Yet American youth by thousands are to-day under Socialistic teaching and conviction. In December, 1912, the Fourth Annual Convention of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society was held in New York. It was reported that there were fifty-nine “chapters” of the society in as many colleges and universities, including all the leading institutions of the country, and eleven graduate chapters. There were between 900 and 1000 members of the undergraduate chapters, and 700 graduate members. The list of “enthusiastic disciples of Karl Marx” among college faculties includes the names of many professors of national repute. Socialism is at work, too, in the schools, and it has schools of its own, and in this city its “Sunday-schools.” The doctrines are put before children and youth not as doctrines of destruction and confiscation, and of revolution by violence and bloodshed, but as principles of ethics, of social justice, and the common good, all leading up to the beautiful dream of the brotherhood of man. College students are asked to consider the working of some privately managed undertaking, and then by plausible illustrations it is pointed out to them that the State could perform the service much better, and thus the ground principle of Socialism gets a lodgment in minds insufficiently informed to detect the falsity of the teaching. In the children’s schools is used “The Socialist Primer,” in which by text and pictures hatred of the rich and well-to-do is implanted, and the workingman is presented as the helpless victim of greed and cruel oppression. The facts of Socialism, the truth about Socialism, are open to ascertainment by every college and university trustee, by every president, by every giver of funds whose benefactions are employed in part to support the teaching of this devil’s creed that is to supplant our old-time reverence for the altar, the hearth-fire, the family, the graves of kindred, and the flag. There is no vital difference between Socialists. The revolutionaries of the Haywood and Debs type and the evolutionary Socialists of the college faculties have virtually a common faith, and tend inevitably to the acceptance of one method for its attainment.
Is this teaching of revolution and confiscation to go on? A sound course of instruction devoted to the exposure of the fallacies, the falsehoods, and the destructive purposes of Socialism in every college where it has gained a foothold, would make the student immune to its poisonous delusions. Truth is the natural shield against error, yet only here and there has its protection been extended over the endangered youth of our colleges. The teaching of false history and false science would not be tolerated anywhere. Is it less important that young men should be safeguarded against false teaching in matters that go to the very groundwork of their morality and their citizenship? The trustees, presidents, and faculties of the country’s seats of learning have a duty to perform that they cannot longer neglect without inviting the sternest censure of public opinion.
THE MONEY BEHIND THE GUN
IN “The Flower of Old Japan,” a poem “for children between six and sixty,” Mr. Alfred Noyes represents his child seekers for the mirror of wisdom as encountering, among other personified phenomena of the adult intelligence, a curiously-inclined people known as the Ghastroi, of whom he says:
“Their dens are always ankle-deep
With twisted knives, and in their sleep
They often cut themselves; they say
That if you wish to live in peace
The surest way is not to cease