m of reform. They wait until they can make the whole
journey in one stride, and would, in the meanwhile, have no one set
forth upon the way. In America the Marxist fatalism has found a sort
of supreme simplification in the gospel of Mr. H. G. Wilshire. The
Trusts, one learns, are to consolidate all the industry in the
country, own all the property. Then when they own everything, the
Nation will take them over. "Let the Nation own the Trusts!" The
Nation in the form of a public, reading capitalistic newspapers,
inured to capitalistic methods, represented and ruled by
capital-controlled politicians, will suddenly take over the Trusts and
begin a new system....

It would be quite charmingly easy--if it were only in the remotest
degree credible.

Sec. 3.

The Marxist teaching tends to an unreasonable fatalism. Its conception
of the world after the class war is over is equally antagonistic to
intelligent constructive effort. It faces that Future, utters the word
"democracy," and veils its eyes.

The conception of democracy to which the Marxist adheres is that same
mystical democracy that was evolved at the first French Revolution; it
will sanction no analysis of the popular wisdom. It postulates a sort
of spirit hidden as it were in the masses and only revealed by a
universal suffrage of all adults--or, according to some Social
Democratic Federation authorities who do not believe in women, all
adult males--at the ballot box. Even a large proportion of the adults
will not do--it must be all. The mysterious spirit that thus peers out
and vanishes again at each election is the People, not any particular
person, but the quintessence, and it is supposed to be infallible; it
is supposed to be not only morally but intellectually omniscient. It
will not even countenance the individuality of elected persons, they
are to be mere tools, _delegates_, from this diffused, intangible
Oracle, the Ultimate Wisdom....

Well, it may seem ungracious to sneer at the grotesque formulation of
an idea profoundly wise, at the hurried, wrong, arithmetical method of
rendering that collective spirit a community undoubtedly can and
sometimes does possess--I myself am the profoundest believer in
democracy, in a democracy awake intellectually, conscious and
self-disciplined--but so long as this mystic faith in the crowd, this
vague, emotional, uncritical way of evading the immense difficulties
of organizing just government and a collective will p