As yet, to the average bourgeois mind, socialism is merely a menace,
vague and formless. The average member of the capitalist class,
when he discusses socialism, is condemned an ignoramus out of his
own mouth. He does not know the literature of socialism, its
philosophy, nor its politics. He wags his head sagely and rattles
the dry bones of dead and buried ideas. His lips mumble mouldy
phrases, such as, "Men are not born equal and never can be;" "It is
Utopian and impossible;" "Abstinence should be rewarded;" "Man will
first have to be born again;" "Cooperative colonies have always
failed;" and "What if we do divide up? in ten years there would be
rich and poor men such as there are today."

It surely is time that the capitalists knew something about this
socialism that they feel menaces them. And it is the hope of the
writer that the socialistic studies in this volume may in some
slight degree enlighten a few capitalistic minds. The capitalist
must learn, first and for always, that socialism is based, not upon
the equality, but upon the inequality, of men. Next, he must learn
that no new birth into spiritual purity is necessary before
socialism becomes possible. He must learn that socialism deals with
what is, not with what ought to be; and that the material with which
it deals is the "clay of the common road," the warm human, fallible
and frail, sordid and petty, absurd and contradictory, even
grotesque, and yet, withal, shot through with flashes and
glimmerings of something finer and God-like, with here and there
sweetnesses of service and unselfishness, desires for goodness, for
renunciation and sacrifice, and with conscience, stern and awful, at
times blazingly imperious, demanding the right,--the right, nothing
more nor less than the right.