armies, hires thugs to beat up unoffending citizens, and uses
the power of wealth to undermine the Government. In one sense, the acts
of the materialist anarchist are clearer even than those of the other.
The people know the ends sought by the powerful. On the other hand, the
ends sought by the terrorist are wholly mysterious; he has not even
taken the trouble to make his program clear. We find, then, that the
anarchist of high finance, who would suppress democracy in the interest
of a new feudalism, and the anarchist of a sect, who would override
democracy in the hope of communism, are classed together in the popular
mind. The man who in this day deifies the individual or the sect, and
would make the rights of the individual or the sect override the rights
of the many, is battling vainly against the supreme current of the age.

Democracy may be a myth. Yet of all the faiths of our time none is more
firmly grounded, none more warmly cherished. If any man refuses to abide
by the decisions of democracy and takes his case out of that court, he
ranges against himself practically the entire populace. On the other
hand, the man who takes his case to that court is often forced to suffer
for a long time humiliating defeats. If the case be a new one but little
understood, there is no place where a hearing seems so hard to win as in
exactly that court. Universal suffrage, by which such cases are decided,
appears to the man with a new idea as an obstacle almost overwhelming.
He must set out on a long and dreary road of education and of
organization; he must take his case before a jury made up of untold
millions; he must wait maybe for centuries to obtain a majority. To go
into this great open court and plead an entirely new cause requires a
courage that is sublime and convictions that have the intensity of a
religion. One who possesses any doubt cannot begin a task so gigantic,
and certainly one who, for any reason, distrusts the people cannot, of
course, put his case in that court. It was with full realization of the
difficulties, of the certainty of repeated defeats, and of the
overwhelming power against them that the socialists entered this great
arena to fight their battle. Universal suffrage is a merciless thing.
How often has it served the purpose of stripping the socialist naked and
exposing him to a terrible humiliation! Again and again, in the history
of the last fifty years, have the socialists, after tremendous
agitatio