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ds or power of the workers. Mr. Berger is reported to have said a few days after this speech: "The idea will in five years have been incorporated into law. Both of the old parties within that time will have incorporated the theory into their platforms. Both the old parties to-day are approaching Socialistic ideas, and appropriating our ideas to save themselves from the coming overthrow."[163] The idea of governmental old-age pensions, on the contrary, has always been popular in certain anti-Socialist circles and is entirely in accord with any intelligent system of purely capitalistic collectivism. Its common adoption by progressive capitalists would seem to indicate that they consider it as being either directly or indirectly conducive to their own interests. It is unnecessary to assume that they adopt it from fear of Socialism. Few if any capitalists consider the overthrow of capitalism as imminent, or feel that Socialism is likely for many years to furnish them with a really acute political problem. A combination of Republicans and Democrats, for example, with a full vote, would easily overwhelm Mr. Berger, the sole Socialist Congressman in his own Congressional district. If present political successes continue, it will still take years for Socialism to send a score of representatives to Congress, and when it does do so, they will be as impotent as ever to overthrow the capitalist order. For any independent representative without political power or responsibility to propose radical reforms in advance of the larger parties is a very simple matter. Statesmen with actual power cannot afford to take up such reforms until the time is _politically_ ripe for their practical consideration. When such a measure is passed, for the individual or group that first proposed it to claim the credit for the change would be absurd. These reforms, when conditions have suitably evolved, become the order of the day, and are urged by all or nearly all the forces of the time. The radical British old-age pension bill, it will be remembered, was passed almost unanimously, although in the Parliament that passed it there were only about 40 Socialist or semi-Socialist representatives out of a total of 670 members. What, then, could be more fatuous than such a view as the following, expressed recently by a well-known Socialist:-- "Do you not think that the whole country should be apprised that this (Berger's Old-age Pension bill) is a Soci
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