Page:May Walden - Woman and Socialism (1909).pdf/17

 Rh mass of ideas and ideals, and of institutions that are intended to preserve the present system of wages and profits. The workers are set to thinking about petty details and are divided into parties that quarrel over whether we shall have a Republican or a Democratic president, or whether we shall use gold or silver, or paper money, or have a two-cent tax or a five-cent one, in order to keep them from seeing that neither the one or the other will give them all that they produce. Notice the way in which the voters are kept in ignorance of the questions that are burning for solution every hour of their lives. I know many young men who vote the Republican ticket because their father voted it; and I know many men who vote the Democratic ticket because their grandfathers and great grandfathers voted it.

The Republican party is the party of the great trusts which kill off the smaller business concerns by ruinous competition and throw their managers into the wage earning class or drive them to suicide. The Democratic party represents the smaller business concerns that clamor for a suppression, or for a regulation of the monopolies, so they can keep on competing with each other. But both parties want profits. They want the chance to rob the worker of the surplus that he creates.

The Socialists argue that there is a better way for everybody to live than by robbing and being robbed. They do not argue this from any vision, but from a logical conclusion of the principles of industrial evolution that I have out-