ages of the million of
babes who have been needlessly and wantonly slaughtered by the Monster
Idea; the images of all the maimed and wounded and killed in the wars
for markets; the millions of others who have been bruised and broken
in the industrial arena to secure somebody's profit, because it was
too expensive to guard life and limb; the numberless victims of
adulterated food and drink, of cheap tenements and shoddy clothes?
Should we not call up the wretched women of our streets; the bribers
and the vendors of privilege? We should surely parade in pitiable
procession the dwarfed and stunted bodies of the millions born to
hardship and suffering, but we could not, alas! parade the dwarfed and
stunted souls, the sordid spirits for which the Monster Idea is
responsible.

I ask you, Jonathan Edwards, what you really think of this "buy cheap
and sell dear" idea, which is the heart and soul of our capitalistic
system. Are you satisfied that it should continue?

Yet, my friend, bad as it is in its full development, and terrible as
are its fruits, this idea once stood for progress. The system was a
step in the liberation of man. It was an advance upon feudalism which
bound the laborer to the soil. Capitalism has not been all bad; it has
another, brighter side. Capitalism had to have laborers who were free
to move from one place to another, even to other lands, and that need
broke down the last vestiges of the old physical slavery. That was a
step gained. Capitalism had to have intelligent workers and many
educated ones. That put into the hands of the common people the key to
the sealed treasuries of knowledge. It had to have a legal system to
meet its requirements and that has resulted in the development of
representative government, of something approaching political
democracy; even where kings nominally rule to-day, their power is but
a shadow of what it once was. Every step taken by the capitalist class
for the advancement of its own interests has become in its turn a
stepping-stone upon which the working-class has raised itself.

Karl Marx once said that the capitalist system provides its own
gravediggers. I have cited two or three things which will illustrate
his meaning. Later on, I must try and explain to you how the great
"trusts" about which you complain so loudly, and which seem to be the
very perfection of the capitalist ideal, lead toward Socialism at a
pace which nothing can very seriously hinder, though it m