at odds with the facts of life, and, above all, does not furnish
them with any protection against the wildest illusions. There is
something wanting in the education that only half educates people.

Whether there is the relation of cause and effect between the two I do
not pretend to say, but universal and superficial education in this
country has been accompanied with the most extraordinary delusions and
the evolution of the wildest theories. It is only necessary to refer, by
way of illustration, to the greenback illusion, and to the whole group of
spiritualistic disturbances and psychological epidemics. It sometimes
seems as if half the American people were losing the power to apply
logical processes to the ordinary affairs of life.

In studying the discontent in this country which takes the form of a
labor movement, one is at first struck by its illogical aspects. So far
as it is an organized attempt to better the condition of men by
association of interests it is consistent. But it seems strange that the
doctrine of individualism should so speedily have an outcome in a
personal slavery, only better in the sense that it is voluntary, than
that which it protested against. The revolt from authority, the assertion
of the right of private judgment, has been pushed forward into a
socialism which destroys individual liberty of action, or to a state of
anarchy in which the weak would have no protection. I do not imagine that
the leaders who preach socialism, who live by agitation and not by labor,
really desire to overturn the social order and bring chaos. If social
chaos came, their occupation would be gone, for if all men were reduced
to a level, they would be compelled to scratch about with the rest for a
living. They live by agitation, and they are confident that government
will be strong enough to hold things together, so that they can continue
agitation.

The strange thing is that their followers who live by labor and expect to
live by it, and believe in the doctrine of individualism, and love
liberty of action, should be willing to surrender their discretion to an
arbitrary committee, and should expect that liberty of action would be
preserved if all property were handed over to the State, which should
undertake to regulate every man's time, occupation, wages, and so on. The
central committee or authority, or whatever it might be called, would be
an extraordinary despotism, tempered only by the idea that it could be