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Show BISHOP SPALDING'S VIEWS. Elsewhere we present some reflections aroused by the Socialist vote cast in Salt Lake and elsewhere. else-where. The Boston Republic is at hand and its leading feature is an interview with Bishop Spalding of Peoria, who happened to be in Boston Bos-ton at the time. Bishop Spalding has given the question of capital and labor profound study. He has been no idle observer of industrial conditions. Xo man in the country has been in closer touch with the wage earner, outside of leaders like John Mitchell. Bishop Spalding was one of the persons selected by President Roosevelt to arbitrate the coal strike. We believe this selection was made in deference to the labor sentiment as much as it was made to fulfill the conditions imposed by the coal barons, that an ecclesiastic should be one of the arbitration commission. 'Why should Socialism grow f" queried Bishop Spalding. "What radical wrong has it upon which j to erect its ladder of vague promises lhat leads into the clouds '. In the United States there is no gulf between the very rich and the very poor, but a graduation of widely distributed wealth. Why, ! let the readers of the Republic remember that more j than eight million families in this country are landholders, and of the thirteen million families among whom the wealth of the country is divided, eleven million families, run the tables of statistics, belong to the wage-earning class. The very rich men I Xo problem there, surely, for it will be found difficult to hold these enormous fortunes together, and if plutocrats spend their time between uttering futile, almost blasphemous, sentiments on Christianity Christi-anity and wealth, the people, without any radical reconstruction, will, in an appreciable time, be strengthened by the wine of released plutocratic fortune running swiftly through the veins of our national life. Socialism is frequently but the pouts of the petulant. Diatribes against wealthy men frequently fre-quently spring from unworthy passions rather than from any sense of wrong inflicted by them. "The good sense of the American democracy will lead it to look upon the assertions of the Socialist So-cialist agitation with distrust. The wood they burn in their temples is green, and the smoke gets between be-tween them and the Supreme good, to which they bow the knee a reformed social order. The impression im-pression that the thousand and one diffusive agencies agen-cies which make us the widest read if not the best read people of the earth, teaches us to regard the radical reformer as one of those enthusiasts who mistake visions for accomplished facts and exaggerate the evil which they seek to remedy. "This tendency to exaggeration, this flaw in the metal of revolutionary proposals, makes the laboring la-boring man, whatever incidental evils he might suffer suf-fer under the condition of competitive production, unwilling to run the risk of putting in jeopardy the two things the American respects the most liberty lib-erty and individuality,. ''One has only to read -the papers with discrimination discrimi-nation and scan statistics with enlightenment to know that our social arrangements are in some respects re-spects provisional only. There is no more reason for believing that the regime of industrialism will not be sloughed off in the upward march of the race than there was reason for Dante to believe that feudalism was the final the petrified form of society. so-ciety. But the point is that this development can be rationally forecast, while the scheme of a glorified social order purged of injustice and greed, not only cannot be inferred from past history, but all that history teaches points, in an opposite direction. This is, you suggest, an era of change J Certainly; freely admitted, but in an era of change the last thing the man of common sense and level wisdom will counsel is the rushing into visionary and untried schemes of social reform;-and reform;-and such a scheme, involving a whole people, remember, re-member, Socialism certainly is. ''Have you ever stopped to consider what the social order is? If you "have, you find that it is an infinitely complex web, the outcome of many forces. So intimately does it affect our thinking and whole circle of mental and emotional activities that we are practically 'its creature. So much so that in order to change it we would have to change human nature. "Until this changes, you may be as sure as you are sure you arc holding a fountain pen at this moment that men will continue to believe that they have a right to their own property, and they will continue to regard the possession of a home, the result of frugality, thrift and a legitimate pride, as one of the chief boons of life. This means that a man has made a relatively independent existence for his wife and children, and that ho is not the pauperized recipient of the community's goods. I don't believe that the poorest resident of Haverhill, Haver-hill, if he freed himself ..from the fumes of Socialist So-cialist phrases, would barter his little for all the radiant promises of an experimental Socialist paradise." |