hispered hope of its martyred advocates. Better far
to stand it out into the open daylight, to let all who will inspect it,
and to prove even to the simplest that such a contrivance once and for
all and for ever cannot be made to run.

Let us turn to examine the machine.

We may omit here all discussion of the historical progress of socialism
and the stages whereby it changed from the creed of a few theorists and
revolutionists to being the accepted platform of great political
parties, counting its adherents by the million. All of this belongs
elsewhere. It suffices here to note that in the process of its rise it
has chafed away much of the superfluous growth that clung to it and has
become a purely economic doctrine. There is no longer any need to
discuss in connection with it the justification of marriage and the
family, and the rightness or wrongness of Christianity: no need to
decide whether the materialistic theory of history is true or false,
since nine socialists out of ten to-day have forgotten, or have never
heard, what the materialistic theory of history is: no need to examine
whether human history is, or is not, a mere record of class
exploitation, since the controversy has long shifted to other grounds.
The essential thing to-day is not the past, but the future. The question
is, what does the socialist have to say about the conditions under which
we live and the means that he advocates for the betterment of them?

His case stands thus. He begins his discussion with an indictment of the
manifold weaknesses and the obvious injustices of the system under which
we live. And in this the socialist is very largely right. He shows that
under free individual competition there is a perpetual waste of energy.
Competing rivals cover the same field. Even the simplest services are
performed with an almost ludicrous waste of energy. In every modern
city the milk supply is distributed by erratic milkmen who skip from
door to door and from street to street, covering the same ground, each
leaving his cans of milk here and there in a sporadic fashion as
haphazard as a bee among the flowers. Contrast, says the socialist, the
wasted labors of the milkman with the orderly and systematic performance
of the postman, himself a little fragment of socialism. And the milkman,
they tell us, is typical of modern industrial society. Competing
railways run trains on parallel tracks, with empty cars that might be
filled and with vast exec