140 East 19th St., New York ALGERNON LEE, Educational Director The only institution in the United States foun- :-: DEPARTMENTS Full Time Course for training Socialist Workers. Local Evening School. October to May Correspondence Courses in Socialism and Labor Problems. Running Continuously thruout the year. Department of Labor Research. Book Store. All information concerning the School sent on application to BERTHA H. MAILLY, Executive Secretary. UNION STENOGRAPHERS, UNION MADE PAPER, UNION PRINTING AND UNION BINDING WERE USED IN THE PREPARATION OF THIS VOLUME. 46 The Leonard Press, N. Y. "The central aim of Socialism is to terminate the divorce of the workers from the natural sources of subsistence and of culture. The Socialist theory is based on the historical assertion that the course of social evolution for centuries has gradually been to exclude the producing classes from the possession of land and capital, and to establish a new subjection, the subjection of workers who have nothing to depend on but precarious wage-labor. Socialists maintain that the present system (in which land and capital are the property of private individuals freely struggling for increase of wealth) leads inevitably to social and economic anarchy, to the degradation of the working man and his family, to the growth of vice and idleness among the wealthy classes and their dependents, to bad and inartistic workmanship, to insecurity, waste and starvation; and that it.is tending more and more to separate society into two classes, wealthy millionaires confronted with an enormous mass of proletarians, the issue of which must either be Socialism or social ruin. To avoid all the evils and to secure a more equitable distribution of the means and appliances of happiness, Socialists propose that land and capital, which are the requisites of labor and the sources of all wealth and culture, should be placed under social ownership and control." Thomas Kirkup, in "History of Socialism,” p. 8. "Socialism is a criticism of existing society which attributes most of the poverty, vice, crime and other social evils of today to the fact that, through the private or class ownership of the social forces of production and exchange, the actual producers of wealth are exploited by a class of non-producers; a theory of social evolution according to which the rate and direction of social evolution are mainly determined by the development of the economic factors of production, distribution and exchange; a social forecast that the next epoch in the evolution of society will be distinguished by the social ownership and control of the principal agencies of production and exchange, and by the equalization of opportunity as a result of this socialization; a movement primarily consisting of members of the wealth-producing class, which seeks to control all the powers of the State and to bring about the collective ownership and control of the principal means of production and exchange, in order that poverty, class antagonisms, vice and other ill results of the existing social system may be abolished and that a new and better social order may be attained." John Spargo, in "Elements of Socialism," p. 5. |