Professor Richard T. Ely well expresses the same thought by saying—­“When we all come to make real genuine sacrifices for our country, sacrifices of which we are conscious, then we shall first begin to have the right kind of loyal love for our country.  We shall never get that kind of love merely by pouring untold benefits upon the citizens."[3] Also, Edward Jenks, the brilliant British historian, says that—­“A society which discourages individual competition, which only acts indirectly upon the bulk of its members, which refuses to recruit its ranks with new blood, contains within itself the seeds of decay."[4]

The attempt by Socialism to substitute a governmental standard of happiness for individual desire and ambition is merely another attempt to legislate human mind and character.  A government cannot make a man happy by law any more than it can make him moral or religious by the same means.  All that law can do is to endeavor to place a man in such an environment that his moral or religious nature may be aroused and that his desire or ambition be encouraged.  It was the inability to understand and realize this fact that caused the religious persecutions of past centuries when Catholics persecuted Protestants and Protestants persecuted Catholics, and both persecuted the Jews, and everybody thought that it was possible to legislate a man’s belief and enforce it by the sanction of the law.  Happiness, like religion, must have its impulse from within.

Furthermore, it is along this identical line of reasoning that Socialism is essentially un-American.  The primary object of the government of the United States, the whole theory upon which our nation was formed, is not to give happiness to the individual.  The Fathers of our country were too wise to attempt any such ridiculous undertaking.  The ideal or object of the United States is to give equality of opportunity for each individual to work out his or her own salvation in a political, a moral or an economic sense.  In other words, to give equality of opportunity for each individual to work out or achieve his or her own happiness.  That is the only possible way in which happiness can be gained.  For this reason the American people believe in public schools and child labor laws and other forms of social, not Socialistic, legislation, in order to help less fortunate individuals to help themselves, and not to help them in spite of themselves.  The former plan is in accordance with the needs of human nature and with American ideas and ideals; the latter is the essential basis of Socialism and inevitably pauperizes and atrophies human character.