efinitely marking itself off. In America we have to
remember that we are dealing with a huge population of people who are
for the most part, and more and more evidently destined under the
present system of free industrial competition, to be either very small
traders, small farmers on the verge of debt, or wages-earners for all
their lives. They are going to lead limited lives and worried lives--and
they know it. Nearly everyone can read and discuss now, the process of
concentrating property and the steady fixation of conditions that were
once fluid and adventurous goes on in the daylight visibly to everyone.
And it has to be borne in mind also that these people are so far under
the sway of the American tradition that each thinks himself as good as
any man and as much entitled to the fullness of life. Whatever social
tradition their fathers had, whatever ideas of a place to be filled
humbly and seriously and duties to be done, have been left behind in
Europe. No Church dominates the scenery of this new land, and offers in
authoritative and convincing tones consolations hereafter for lives
obscurely but faithfully lived. Whatever else happens in this national
future, upon one point the patriotic American may feel assured, and that
is of an immense general discontent in the working class and of a
powerful movement in search of a general betterment. The practical forms
and effects of that movement will depend almost entirely upon the
average standard of life among the workers and their general education.
Sweated and ill-organised foreigners, such as one finds in New Jersey
living under conditions of great misery, will be fierce, impatient and
altogether dangerous. They will be acutely exasperated by every picture
of plutocratic luxury in their newspaper, they will readily resort to
destructive violence. The western miner, the western agriculturist,
worried beyond endurance between the money-lender and railway
combinations will be almost equally prone to savage methods of
expression. _The Appeal to Reason_, for example, to which I have made
earlier reference in this chapter, is furious to wreck the present
capitalistic system, but it is far too angry and impatient for that
satisfaction to produce any clear suggestion of what shall replace it.

To call this discontent of the seething underside of the American system
Socialism is a misnomer. Were there no Socialism there would be just as
much of this discontent, just the same i