"

Now listen once more to the words of Morris Hillquit, who poses before
the public as in a different class from the American Communists and
Communist Laborites. In "The Call," May 21, 1919, in a long article in
large type covering half the editorial page, Morris Hillquit said of the
"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
Socialistic 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." (Italics mine.)

The wisdom of this crafty, go-slow policy is now apparent, with the
"Left Wing" leaders in jail, and Hillquit's chameleons now posing as
angels of light, the saviors of "representative government" in America.
The fact that the Socialist Party of America "goes into politics" does
not make it less dangerous than the other revolutionary bodies, but more
dangerous, for it thus expects to have men in political positions to
seize the reins of government when the hour of blood and violence
arrives. That this is its definite policy, the meaning of its political
activity, was apparent as far back as its National Convention of 1908,
when, in opposing those who would dismiss the use of the ballot in favor
of "direct action"--violence--exclusively, Victor L. Berger said:

"I have no doubt that in the last analysis we must shoot, and when
it comes to shooting, Wisconsin will be there.... In order to be
able to shoot even some day we must have the powers of political
government in our hands, at least to a great extent. I want that
understood. So everybody who is talking to you about direct action
and so on, and about political action being a humbug, is your enemy
today, because he keeps you from getting the powers of political
government." ("Proceedings of the 1908 National Conv