ing threat of this one party's progress towards the
revolutionary ideal. But this one party would have no more need to
waste its time upon palliative measures than it would have to soil
itself with the dirt of practical politics and the bargain counter.
The other parties would do all that and do it well. The one party
would be concerned with nothing but making converts to its
philosophy and preparing for the revolution that its steadfast
course would render inevitable. Such a party would represent the
highest possible efficiency in politics, the greatest force in the
State, and the ultimate triumph of its full philosophy would be
beyond question."

Thus we see that in America reformism is regarded as a dangerous
innovation, and that, before it had finished its second prosperous year,
it had been abjured by those who have the best claim to speak for the
American Party. Nevertheless it still persists and, indeed, continues
to develop rapidly--if less rapidly than the opposite, or revolutionary,
policy--and deserves the most careful consideration.

While "reformism" only became a practical issue in the American Party in
_1910_, it had its beginnings much earlier. The Milwaukee Socialists had
set on the "reformist" course even before the formation of the present
national party (in 1900). Even at this early time they had developed
what the other Socialists had sought to avoid, a "leader"--in the
person of Mr. Victor Berger. At first editor of the local German
Socialist organ, the _Vorwaerts_, then of the _Social-Democratic
Herald_, acknowledged leader at the time of the municipal victory in the
spring of 1910, and now the American Party's first member of Congress,
Mr. Berger has not merely been the Milwaukee organization's chief
spokesman, organizer, and candidate throughout this period, but he has
come to be the chief spokesman of the present reformist wing of the
American Party. His editorials and speeches as Congressman, and the
policies of the Milwaukee municipal administration, now so much in the
public eye, will afford a fairly correct idea of the main features both
of the Socialism that has so far prevailed in Milwaukee, and of American
"reformism" in general.

"Socialism is an epoch of human history which will no doubt last many
hundred years, possibly a thousand years," wrote Mr. Berger,
editorially, in 1910. "Certainly a movement whose aims are spread out
over