Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 14.djvu/223

 are the proper consequences of life, without ideals of virtue and duty. There are resources in decency and virtue and right living, that are sure. To these resources, loose, vicious and idle lives never can pretend. If the straight way is not the primrose path, it certainly is the only safe one."

The motives spurring the Editor against the oncoming hosts of paternalism already have been outlined in this article. He thought the rising power of collectivism and communism, unless checked by later forces, ultimately would submerge the energetic, the thrifty members of society. Immediately it was bringing vastly extended functions of government, multiplied office-holders and "free" enjoyments for the masses that pay little or no part of the expense in taxes and that control taxation through non-propertied suffrage. Socialism, he defined as the negation of all private property, since equality is the essence of all its doctrines; as "the growing disposition to substitute communism for individualism, an increasing desire to use the State as a vehicle for support of the thriftless, by levying upon the accumulation of the thrifty; an increasing antagonism to the man who through patience, energy and self-denial, accumulates, and an increasing encouragement to the incompetent to rely upon society as a whole for sustenance and even entertainment" (April 15, 1901). Again: "It implies that industry, prudence, temperance and thrift should divide their earnings with indolence, stupidity, imprudence, intemperance and consequent poverty" (March 10, 1892). Once more: "It means that the state, or the community in general, is to be the collective owner of all the instruments of production and transport—by instruments meaning all things requisite, including land, to produce and to circulate commodities. That is to say, the state is to own all things which economists call capital—all the land, all factories, workshops, warehouses, machinery, plant, appliances, railways, rolling stock, ships, etc." (July 9, 1895).

This definition excited hostile criticism of varied degree from socialists, who would flood the editorial table with copious let-