thout enveloping Italy, France and England. Not even the
Seven Seas can stop it.
Under the capitalist system most people are and must continue to be
slaves. If you are a slave (all wage earners, as such, are slaves) the
socialist literature, the greatest of all literatures, will thrill you
with the hope of liberty. Read, note and inwardly digest it. No wage
earner who does this will ever again vote either the Democratic or the
Republican ticket. As a whole this literature is a brilliantly
illuminating and almost resistlessly persuasive explanation of the most
sane, the most salutary and withal the most promising movement towards
the freeing of all toiling men, women and children (nine of every ten)
from their body and soul destroying slavery.
Both Socrates and Jesus are recorded as teaching that the saviour of the
world is truth. Among saving truths (there is no truth without some
saving efficacy) the greatest is the one which was discovered and
formulated concurrently by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels and it is in
substance this: all which makes for the good of mankind ultimately
depends wholly upon the laborious constructors and operators of the
machines for the cultivation, production and distribution of the
necessities of life, not at all upon the owners of these machines, who
at best are idlers and at worst schemers, and in any case parasites.
In the beginning was Work. All things were made by it; and without
it was not anything made that was made. In it was life; and the
life was the light of men.
The opening verses of the gospel according to John have been thus
interpreted. The commentator acknowledges that they do not read so now,
but contends for good and sufficient reasons, that, if there ever was
any truth in them, something to this effect must have been their
original reading. Certainly there is no truth in them as they have come
down to us.
This representation to the effect that productive labor is the saviour
of the world, its real god, the divinity in which we live, move and have
our being, is the great truth, the gospel of International Socialism,
the greatest of all movements, the movement which carries the only
rational hope for the freeing of mankind from all its unnecessary
suffering--and the most poignant sufferings, those imposed by the great
trinity of evils: (war, poverty and slavery) are not necessary.
Capitalism and Christianism are alike not only in having gods
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