es, _employers as a class_ are seeing that the _laborers as a
class_ are, after all, their chief asset: and are therefore organizing
to care for them through governmental action, as working animals, even
more systematically and infinitely more scientifically than slaves were
ever cared for. He is exhausting his efforts to persuade, or perhaps he
would say to compel, the government to the very action that the
interests of its capitalist masters most strongly demand.

Curiously enough, Mr. Berger expressed the "reformist," the
revolutionary, and the State capitalist principle in this same speech,
without being in the least troubled with the contradictions. He spoke of
industrial crises, irregular employment and unemployment as if they were
permanent features of capitalism:--

"These new inventions, machines, improvements, and labor devices,
displace human labor and steadily increase the army of unemployed,
who, starved and frantic, are ever ready to take the places of
those who have work, thereby still further depressing the labor
market."

The collectivist capitalists have already set themselves aggressively
to work to abolish unemployment, to make employment regular, to connect
the worker that needs a job with the job that needs a worker, and to put
an end to industrial crises, and with every promise of success.

Immediately afterward, Mr. Berger made a correct statement of the
Socialist position:--

"The average of wages, the certainty of employment, the social
privileges, and the independence of the wage-earning and
agricultural population, _when compared with the increase of wealth
and social production_, are steadily and rapidly decreasing."

The Socialist indictment is not that unemployment, irregularity of
employment, or any other social evil is increasing absolutely, or that
it is beyond the reach of capitalist reform; but that _the share of the
constantly increasing total of wealth and prosperity that goes to the
laborers is constantly growing less_.

A few minutes later in the same speech, Mr. Berger indorsed pure "State
Socialism." Legislation, he said, that does not tend to _an increased
measure of control on the part of society as a whole_ is not in line
with the trend of economic evolution and cannot last. This formulates
capitalistic collectivism with absolute distinctness. What it demands is
not a new order, but more order. What it opposes is not