A third influence that may also contribute very materially to the reconstruction of the American tradition is the Socialist movement.  It is true that so far American Socialism has very largely taken an Anarchistic form, has been, in fact, little more than a revolutionary movement of the wages-earning class against the property owner.  It has already been pointed out that it derives not from contemporary English Socialism but from the Marxist social democracy of the continent of Europe, and has not even so much of the constructive spirit as has been developed by the English Socialists of the Fabian and Labour Party group or by the newer German evolutionary Socialists.  Nevertheless, whenever Socialism is intelligently met by discussion or whenever it draws near to practicable realisation, it becomes, by virtue of its inherent implications, a constructive force, and there is no reason to suppose that it will not be intelligently met on the whole and in the long run in America.  The alternative to a developing Socialism among the labouring masses in America is that revolutionary Anarchism from which it is slowly but definitely marking itself off.  In America we have to remember that we are dealing with a huge population of people who are for the most part, and more and more evidently destined under the present system of free industrial competition, to be either very small traders, small farmers on the verge of debt, or wages-earners for all their lives.  They are going to lead limited lives and worried lives—­and they know it.  Nearly everyone can read and discuss now, the process of concentrating property and the steady fixation of conditions that were once fluid and adventurous goes on in the daylight visibly to everyone.  And it has to be borne in mind also that these people are so far under the sway of the American tradition that each thinks himself as good as any man and as much entitled to the fullness of life.  Whatever social tradition their fathers had, whatever ideas of a place to be filled humbly and seriously and duties to be done, have been left behind in Europe.  No Church dominates the scenery of this new land, and offers in authoritative and convincing tones consolations hereafter for lives obscurely but faithfully lived.  Whatever else happens in this national future, upon one point the patriotic American may feel assured, and that is of an immense general discontent in the working class and of a powerful movement in search of a general betterment.  The practical forms and effects of that movement will depend almost entirely upon the average standard of life among the workers and their general education.  Sweated and ill-organised foreigners, such as one finds in New Jersey living under conditions of great misery, will be fierce, impatient and altogether dangerous.  They will be acutely exasperated by every picture of plutocratic luxury in their newspaper, they will readily resort to destructive violence.  The western miner, the western agriculturist, worried beyond endurance between the money-lender and railway combinations will be almost equally prone to savage methods of expression. The Appeal to Reason, for example, to which I have made earlier reference in this chapter, is furious to wreck the present capitalistic system, but it is far too angry and impatient for that satisfaction to produce any clear suggestion of what shall replace it.