Page:Eleven Blind Leaders (1910?).pdf/11

 A. M. Simons starts out by saying that he has "been asked that question about seven million times." He then proceeds to answer it by saying that "municipal undertakings in co-operation would have progressed just as they have in Europe." Then the ownership would be extended to the most concentrated capital. Employment for the unemployed would force up wages and practically make private business unprofitable. The wage system, Simons thinks, would probably continue long after the arrival of a socialist regime, due to replacing an old system by one radically different.

Finally, National Secretary J. M. Barnes declares that he would "use the power of taxation—to the limit of confiscation, if you please—to change the ownership of wealth from private to public." Barnes quotes Benjamin Franklin in justification of such policy on the part of a socialist administration, and furthermore contends that his proposition is quite in accord with existing law and the present constitution.

There you have the symposium on "practical socialism," supplementing the two speeches of Simons and Kennedy before the Chicago Propaganda League of the Industrial Workers of the World.

"INTELLECTUAL" SPOKESMEN FOR THE WORKERS

It is not my purpose, in replying to these vagaries of "political opportunism," to spend much time with what might be construed as mere personal attacks upon the group of "leading socialists" who have thus taken part in this symposium in the name of socialism. Still I am reminded of the substance of what Wendell Phillips said in an anti-slavery speech. When accused of being too harsh in his attacks upon public men who upheld slavery, the great orator replied that the rank and file were more often influenced through their feelings and sentiments than by sober reasoning and facts, and that in order to force the mass of men to take notice of events, it was often necessary first to shake their faith in their