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crease its vote at the ballot box. It believes that by this increase the attainment of its goal is brought ever nearer, and also that _the menace of this increasing vote_ induces the capitalist class to grant concessions in the hope of preventing further increases. _It criticizes non-Socialist efforts at reform as comparatively barren of positive benefit_ and as tending, on the whole, to insure the dominance of the capitalist class and to continue the grave social evils now prevalent."[169] (My italics.) Because non-Socialist reforms tend to prolong the domination of the capitalist class, which no Socialist doubts, it is asserted that they are also comparatively barren of positive benefit. And if, from time to time and in contradiction to this view, changes are bought about by non-Socialist governments which undeniably do very much improve the condition of the working people, it is reasoned that this was done by the _menace_ either of a Socialist revolution or of a Socialist electoral majority. "A _Socialist_ reform must be in the nature of a working-class conquest," says Mr. Hillquit in his "Socialism in Theory and Practice"--expressing this very widespread Socialist opinion. He says that reforms inaugurated by small farmers, manufacturers, or traders, cause an "arrest of development or even a return to conditions of past ages, while the reforms of the more educated classes if less reactionary are not of a more efficient type." "The task of developing and extending factory legislation falls entirely on the organized workmen," according to this view, because the dominant classes have no interest in developing it, while the evils of the slums and of the employment of women and children in industry can be cured only by Socialism. Such reforms as can be obtained in this direction, though they are not considered by Mr. Hillquit "as the beginnings or installments of a Socialist system," he holds are to be obtained only with Socialist aid. In other words, while capitalism is not altogether unable or unwilling to benefit the working people, it can do little, and even this little is due to the presence of the Socialists. Another example of the "reformist's" view may be seen in the editorials of Mr. Berger, in the _Social-Democratic Herald_, of Milwaukee, where he says that the Social-Democrats never fail to declare that with all the social reforms, good and worthy of support as they may be, conditions _cannot be permane
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