of love and chastity, and of religion itself. It was a tainted creed.
There was blood upon its hands and bloody menace in its thoughts. It was
a thing to be stamped out, to be torn up by the roots. The very soil in
which it grew must be burned out with the flame of avenging justice.

Such it still appears to many people to-day. The unspeakable savagery of
bolshevism has made good the wildest threats of the partisans of
violence and fulfilled the sternest warnings of the conservative. To-day
more than ever socialism is in danger of becoming a prescribed creed,
its very name under the ban of the law, its literature burned by the
hangman and a gag placed upon its mouth.

But this is neither right nor wise. Socialism, like every other
impassioned human effort, will flourish best under martyrdom. It will
languish and perish in the dry sunlight of open discussion.

For it must always be remembered in fairness that the creed of violence
has no necessary connection with socialism. In its essential nature
socialism is nothing but a proposal for certain kinds of economic
reform. A man has just as much right to declare himself a socialist as
he has to call himself a Seventh Day Adventist or a Prohibitionist, or a
Perpetual Motionist. It is, or should be, open to him to convert others
to his way of thinking. It is only time to restrain him when he proposes
to convert others by means of a shotgun or by dynamite, and by forcible
interference with their own rights. When he does this he ceases to be a
socialist pure and simple and becomes a criminal as well. The law can
deal with him as such.

But with socialism itself the law, in a free country, should have no
kind of quarrel. For in the whole program of peaceful socialism there is
nothing wrong at all except one thing. Apart from this it is a high and
ennobling ideal truly fitted for a community of saints. And the one
thing that is wrong with socialism is that it won't work. That is all.
It is, as it were, a beautiful machine of which the wheels, dependent
upon some unknown and uninvented motive power, refuse to turn. The
unknown motive force in this case means a power of altruism, of
unselfishness, of willingness to labor for the good of others, such as
the human race has never known, nor is ever likely to know. But the
worst public policy to pursue in reference to such a machine is to lock
it up, to prohibit all examination of it and to allow it to become a
hidden mystery, the w