he result of long centuries of growth and development. From our
present position we look back over the blood-blotted pages of history,
back to the ages before men began to write their history and their
thoughts, through the centuries of which there is only faint
tradition; we go even further back, to the very beginning of human
existence, to the men-apes and the ape-men whose existence science has
made clear to us, and we see the race engaged in a long struggle to

Move upward, working out the beast
And let the ape and tiger die.

We look for the means whereby the progress of man has been made, and
find that his tools have been, so to say, the ladder upon which he has
risen in the age-long climb from bondage toward brotherhood, from
being a brute armed with a club to the sovereign of the universe,
controlling tides, harnessing winds, gathering the lightning in his
hands and reaching to the farthest star.

We find in every epoch of that long evolution the means of producing
wealth as the center of all, transforming government, laws,
institutions and moral codes to meet their limitations and their
needs. Nothing has ever been strong enough to restrain the economic
forces in social evolution. When laws and customs have stood in the
way of the economic forces they have been burst asunder as by some
mighty leaven, or hurled aside in the cyclonic sweep of revolutions.

Have you ever gone into the country, Jonathan, and noticed an immense
rock split and shattered by the roots of a tree, or perhaps by the
might of an insignificant looking fungus? I have, many times, and I
never see such a rock without thinking of its aptness as an
illustration of this Socialist philosophy. A tiny acorn tossed by the
wind finds lodgment in some small crevice of a rock which has stood
for thousands of years, a rock so big and strong that men choose it as
an emblem of the Everlasting. Soon the warm caresses of the sun and
the rain wake the latent life in the acorn; the shell breaks and a
frail little shoot of vegetable life appears, so small that an infant
could crush it. Yet that weak and puny thing grows on unobserved,
striking its rootlets farther into the crevice of the rock. And when
there is no more room for it to grow, _it does not die, but makes room
for itself by shattering the rock_.

Economic forces are like that, my friend, they _must_ expand and grow.
Nothing can long restrain them. A new method of producing wealth broke