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It seems almost a waste of time and energy to say anything about avowed theoretical socialism in the face of such unavowed practical communism. But I have tried to find the most dispassionate and yet the frankest statement of its aims and the argument by which it tries to support them. It seems most tersely and candidly put by Bax in an essay first published in one of the leading English reviews and now reprinted in a volume to which it gives its title, "The Ethics of Socialism." The author claims, and he is in substantial harmony with the latest exponents of socialism, that according to its ethic every man should identify himself with humanity not in the way of self- sacrifice to other individuals as such but by the identification of the material conditions of individual well-being with those of social well-being. This being an economic age these conditions are economic. We ask ourselves in passing whether this is not on the whole a truthful generalization of the drift of the popular mind and the tendency of legislation. But hear the writer in his own words: "In what I may term a concrete ethic self-sacrifice can never be more than an accident. The substance of such ethic consists not in the humiliation of self before God but in the identification of self with humanity. By this we should observe is not especially to be understood the ' living for others ' of the current Christian ethics which at best means sacrificing oneself for other individuals as individuals. What we here mean is . . . . that affirmation of self with or identification of self in society which in the first instance can only be brought about by the identification of the material conditions of individual well-being with those of social well-being." Put in less philosophical terms this seems to mean that we are not, as the Christian ethic claims, to live for others but on others. Legal right, not duty, is the rule of conduct. The obligations of the moral law and the golden rule must yield to changed standards just as far and as fast as public opinion can be brought to tolerate them. The organization of the socialists is on the whole more dignified than that of the advocates of indiscriminate pensions because it is open and avowed, but as far as the latter have gone it looks as if their aims were identical. Even the German socialists, fiercest of their kind, now propose to abandon strikes and boycotts except in emergencies of the most extreme sort. They too propose to appeal to the majority. This is not caution or gentleness born of recent emancipation, as has been suggested, but shrewdness. They believe, wrongly we hope, that they no longer need force for their schemes, but that what is done every day under specious pretexts by others maybe done through peaceable agitation and openly by themselves.

There is one aspect of the whole matter to which allusion has incidentally been made which deserves somewhat further emphasis. The giving and taking of money where service has been rendered are honorable acts. They are honorable in a still higher degree where necessity is relieved by an able and generous patron; as when the feeble, aged, or incapable are cared for by the state. But they are dangerous in every respect to both parties where neither service is rendered nor real want exists. The legitimately pensioned soldier is a man worthy of all respect; but the individual who masquerades as a disabled soldier where military service had nothing to do with his weakness is an impostor or self-deceived. When a great class of such men are offered and accept grants from the treasury (that is from the pockets of their fellow-citizens) not only is their own manhood destroyed, which might be endured, but there rises at once a far more serious menace to the public welfare in that their example becomes contagious. There was an old debate among the encyclopaedists as to whether strong individuality be the representation of class or differentiation from class. The man who widely differs from all of his kind is eccentric; class type makes the strong personality. If this be true the pauperization of any class will produce representative paupers whose effrontery rests on the support of numbers. This is already happening, and the men with glib tongues and spurious arguments who support measures such as we are discussing grow more numerous and influential every day. We are threatened with the pauperization not of a few of the million unpensioned survivors of the late war but with the degradation of a body of citizens once the most heroic in the land. The old soldier, independent, self-respecting, and ubiquitous, should be a strong moral force in the community, an example and inspiration to us, to our children, and perhaps to our children's children. But, alas! the prospect is otherwise. Already the decline of his influence has begun. Veterans of the army wonder why they often fail to arouse enthusiasm where once they were received with rapture. In the ordinary community, city or country, their power, which should be enormous, is nothing at all, for they are too often immovable partisans and drones without energy. The reason is surely not because the flight of time has dulled our true gratitude or diminished the luster of glorious service. As yet there is not a respectable community where a man putting forth a fraudulent claim against his fellow-man, and supporting it by false evidence, could hold up his head. This is done, however, every day in the matter of pensions. Prosecutions have been tried, but, as a rule, they fail because the jury will not convict. Now juries are in an important sense the barometer of public morality, and we are forced to confess that the country as a whole tolerates the recipients of fraudulent pensions. The reason is in part cowardice born of political affiliations, in part a general feeling that any one who can get something from the government is a clever fellow and ought to enjoy it. But the general moral sense, though degraded, revenges itself in a diminished respect for the sharpers, and secondarily on the military survivors as a class.