projects from Babuvism to Bolshevism, which, if they could not
install Utopia overnight, were at least calculated to destroy
Civilization as it is. The common feature of the propagandists of
all these doctrines seems to be the throwing-over of the Past;
not merely of the proved evils and inadequacies of the Past, but
of our conception of right and wrong, of morals, of human
relations, and of our duty towards the Eternal, which, having
sprung out of the Past, must be jettisoned in a fury of contempt.
In short, the destroyers of Society (writhing under the
immemorial sting of injustice, which they believed was wholly
caused by their privileged fellows, and not even in part inherent
in the nature of things) supposed that by blotting out Privilege
they could establish their ideals of Justice and Equality.

In the forward nations of Europe, not less than in the United
States, these ideals had been arrived at, at least in name, and
so far as concerned politics. Even in Germany, the most rigid of
Absolute Despot isms, a phantasm of political liberty was allowed
to flit about the Halls of Parliament. But through the cunning of
Bismarck the Socialist masses were bound all the more tightly to
the Hohenzollern Despot by liens which seemed to be socialistic.
Nevertheless, the principles of the Social Revolution spread
secretly from European country to country, whether it professed
to be Monarchical or Republican.

In the United States, when Theodore Roosevelt succeeded to the
Presidency in 1901, a similar antagonism between Capital and
Labor had become chronic. Capital was arrogant. Its advance since
the Civil War had been unmatched in history. The inundation of
wealth which had poured in, compared with all previous amassing