evolutionary forces in
the Socialist Party get together for counsel and action."

Apparently so many bitter letters were sent to "The Call" that it found
it expedient to publish the following notice in its edition of May 16,
1919:

"No letters dealing in personalities of any kind will be published
in this column. All views and all arguments set forth must be
confined strictly to the principles and tactics either defended or
attacked. This ruling is by the unanimous vote of the Board of
Managers of 'The Call.'"

Morris Hillquit, member of the National Executive Committee of the
Socialist Party till September, 1919, and one of the principle leaders
of the Right, published in his paper, "The Call," May 21, 1919, a long
article in large type, covering half of the editorial page, under the
caption, "The Socialist Task and Outlook." After speaking of the gloomy
conditions in the Socialist Party abroad, he thus comments on conditions
in the American branch of the international organization:

"All the more unfortunate is it that the energies of the Socialist
Party should at this time be dissipated in acrimonious and
fruitless controversies brought on by the self-styled Left Wing
movement. I am one of the last men in the party to ignore or
misunderstand the sound revolutionary impulse which animates the
rank and file of this new movement, but the specific form and
direction which it has assumed, its program and tactics, spell
disaster to our movement. I am opposed to it, not because it is too
radical, but because it is essentially reactionary and
non-Socialistic; not because it would lead us too far, but because
it would lead us nowhere. To prate about the dictatorship of the
proletariat and of workers' Soviets in the United States at this
time is to deflect the Socialist propaganda from its realistic
basis, and to advocate the abolition of all social reform planks in
the party platform means to abandon the concrete class struggle as
it presents itself from day to day.

"The Left Wing movement, as I see it, is a purely emotional reflex
of the situation in Russia. The cardinal vice of the movement is
that it started as a wing, i.e., as a schismatic and disintegrating
movement. Proceeding on the arbitrary assumption that they were the
Left, the ingenuous leaders of the movement had to discover