by Louis XIV. of the Huguenots from France.  These two great crimes of history had important economic consequences, but the cause behind them was religious prejudice.  Prof.  James Franklin Jameson, of the Carnegie Institution at Washington, rightly has stressed a study of the religious denominations in the United States, of the Baptist, Methodist and other “circuit riders” of the old Middle West, as one of the most fruitful sources for a fuller knowledge and understanding of the history and development of the American nation.  Neither George Whitefield, Peter Cartwright, nor Phillips Brooks of a later day, can be explained in terms of economic interpretation.

This false and entirely materialistic conception of the development of society and civilization is a mistake not only of the learned, but of the pseudo-learned, of the men and women of more or less education whose mental development has not progressed beyond an appreciation of Bernard Shaw, Henrik Ibsen and H.G.  Wells.  Most of them are estimable people, but the difficulty is that they are so idealistic that, so to speak, they never have both feet upon the ground at the same time.  This is especially true of our esteemed contemporaries, the Socialists.  These cheerful servants of an idealistic mammon pride themselves upon completely ignoring human nature.  A few years ago, at a London meeting of the “parlor Socialists” known as the Fabian Society which, by the way, was presided over by Bernard Shaw, an old man began to harangue the audience with the words, “Human nature being as it is—­” At once his voice was drowned out by a chorus of jeers, cat-calls and laughter.  He never made his address, for the audience was unwilling to hear anything about “human nature.”  No Socialists in general are willing to do so, for human nature, with the mental and spiritual sides of life, is just the element with which their fallacious creed cannot deal, and they know it.  But the human element must enter into business and trade in the problems of direction, management, even in the form of competition itself, and cannot possibly be eradicated.

It is amusing to note that these same Socialists are busily occupied with pointing out what they consider to be the failures of government, as well as of “business and capitalism.”  Yet they do not realize that they are thus condemning their own system, for if the governments of the world have failed to do the work at present laid upon them, how can they ever undertake the gigantic additional political and capitalistic burden that Socialism would impose?  Thomas Jefferson, the patron saint of the party that President Wilson now leads, always expressed a fear of “too much government.”  It would appear that the present Administration and the Democratic members of Congress have wandered far from their old beliefs, and if recent legislation is the result of it, their Socialistic experiments have not been much of a success.

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