dern Socialist propagandists are very
well aware of this attitude of the working classes towards their
schemes, and therefore that as long as they explain the real programme
they mean to put into operation, which is nothing but the workhouse
system on a gigantic scale, they can meet with no success. As a
life-long Socialist has frequently observed to me, "Socialism has never
been a working-class movement; it was always we of the middle or upper
classes who sought to instil the principles of Socialism into the minds
of working men." Mr. Hyndman's candid confessions of the failures to
enlist the sympathies even of slum-dwellers in his schemes of social
regeneration bear out this testimony.

Less honest Socialist orators as the result of long experience have
therefore adopted the more effectual policy of appealing to the
predatory instincts of the crowd. From Babeuf onwards, Socialism has
only been able to make headway by borrowing the language of Anarchy in
order to blast its way to power.

Socialism is thus essentially a system of deception devised by
middle-class theorists and in no sense a popular creed. Had the
revolutionary movement of the past 150 years really proceeded from the
people, it would inevitably have followed the line laid down by one of
the two sections of the proletariat indicated above, that is to say, it
would either have taken the form of a continuous and increasing
agitation for social reforms which would have enlisted the sympathy of
all right-thinking men and must therefore in the end have proved
irresistible, or it would have followed the line of Anarchy, organizing
brigandage on a larger and yet larger scale, until, all owners of wealth
having been exterminated and their expropriators in their turn
exterminated by their fellows, the world would have been reduced to a
depopulated desert.

But the world revolution has followed neither of these lines. Always the
opponent of sane social reforms which Socialists deride as "melioration"
or as futile attempts to shore up an obsolete system, it has
consistently disassociated itself from such men as Lord Shaftesbury, who
did more to better the conditions of the working classes than anyone who
has ever lived. Anarchy, on the other hand, has been used by them merely
as a means to an end; for genuine revolutionary sentiment they have no
use at all. In Russia the Anarchists became the first objects of Soviet
vengeance. The cynical attitude of Socialists t