t of the old Brevoort,
talking with a bunch of men who are trying to find out where the world
is going, and why and when and how, and asking who are the prophets
who are going to show it the way. We'd be getting excited over Shaw
and Wells. There's something really worth getting excited over.

"These men have perceived that this world is not a crazy-quilt of
unrelated races, but a collection of human beings completely related,
with all our interests--food and ambitions and the desire to
play--absolutely in common; so that if we would take thought all
together, and work together, as a football team does, we would start
making a perfect world.

"That's what socialism--of which you're beginning to hear so much, and
of which you're going to hear so much more--means. If you feel
genuinely impelled to vote the Republican ticket, that's not my
affair, of course. Indeed, the Socialist party of this country
constitutes only one branch of international socialism. But I do
demand of you that you try to think for yourselves, if you are going
to have the nerve to vote at all--think of it--to vote how this whole
nation is to be conducted! Doesn't that tremendous responsibility
demand that you do something more than inherit your way of voting?
that you really think, think hard, why you vote as you do?... Pardon
me for getting away from the subject proper--yet am I, actually? For
just what I have been saying is one of the messages of Shaw and Wells.

"The great vision of the glory that shall be, not in one sudden
millennium, but slowly advancing toward joys of life which we can no
more prevision than the aboriginal medicine-man could imagine the
X-ray! I wish that this were the time and the place to rhapsodize
about that vision, as William Morris has done, in _News from Nowhere_.
You tell me that the various brands of socialists differ so much in
their beliefs about this future that the bewildered layman can make
nothing at all of their theories. Very well. They differ so much
because there are so many different things we _can_ do with this human
race.... The defeat of death; the life period advancing to ten-score
years all crowded with happy activity. The solution of labor's
problem; increasing safety and decreasing hours of toil, and a way out
for the unhappy consumer who is ground between labor and capital. A
real democracy and the love of work that shall come when work is not
relegated to wage-slaves, but joyously shared in a co