In Switzerland the government has recently acquired the principal railroad systems. In Holland, Belgium and Denmark also the railroads are largely government roads. In Russia the government owns and operates the roads and I found there a new form of collectivism, namely, the employment of a community physician, who treats the people without charge. These physicians are employed by societies called Zemstro, which have control of the roads and the care of the sick.
In Germany, however, socialism as an economic theory is being urged by a strong and growing party. In the last general election the socialists polled a little more than three million votes out of a total of about nine and a half millions. Measured by the popular vote it is now the strongest party in Germany. The fact that with thirty-one per cent of the vote it only has eighty-one members of the reichstag out of a total of 397 is due, in part, to the fact that the socialist vote is massed in the cities and, in part, to the fact that the population has increased more rapidly in the cities, and, as there has been no recent redistricting, the socialist city districts are larger than the districts returning members of other parties.
George von Vollmar, a member of the reichstag, in a recent issue of the National Review thus states the general purpose of the social democratic party in Germany:
"It is well known that social democracy in all countries, as its name indicates, aims in the first place at social and economic reform. It starts from the point of view that economic development, the substitution of machinery for hand implements, and the supplanting of small factories by gigantic industrial combinations, deprive the worker in an ever increasing degree of the essential means of production, thereby converting him into a possessionless proletarian, and that the means of production are becoming the exclusive possession of a comparatively small number of capitalists, who constantly monopolize all the advantages which the gigantic increase in the productive capacity of human effort has brought about. Thus, according to the social democrats, capital is master of all the springs of life, and lays a yoke on the working classes in particular, and the whole population in general, which ever becomes more and more unbearable. The masses, as their insight into the general trend of affairs develops, become daily more and more conscious of the contrast between the exploiter and the exploited, and in all countries with an industrial development society is divided into two hostile camps, which wage war on each other with ever increasing bitterness.
KAISER WILHELM.
"To this class-war is due the origin and continuous development of social democracy, the chief task of which is to unite these factions in an harmonious whole which they will direct to its true goal. Industrial combination on a large scale can be converted from a source of misery and oppression into a source of the greatest prosperity and of harmonious perfection, when the means of production cease to be the exclusive appanage of capital and are transferred to the hands of society at large. The social revolution here indicated implies the liberation not only of the proletariat, but of mankind as a whole, which suffers from the decomposing influence of existing class antagonism whereby all social progress is crippled."
One of the most influential of the German socialists, in answer to a series of questions submitted by me, said in substance: