But, it will be pointed out, the working class has advanced.  Power has been acquired by labor unions and syndicates.  In the beginning power was won by the principle of the restriction of numbers.  The device of refusing to admit more than a fixed number of new members to the unions of the various trades has been justified as necessary for the upholding of the standard of wages and of working conditions.  This has been the practice in precisely those unions which have been able through years of growth and development to attain tangible strength and power.  Such a principle of restriction is necessary in the creation of a firmly and deeply rooted trunk or central organization furnishing a local center for more extended organization.  It is upon this great principle of restricted number that the labor unions have generated and developed power.  They have acquired this power without any religious emotionalism, without subscribing to metaphysical or economic theology.  For the millenium and the earthly paradise to be enjoyed at some indefinitely future date, the union member substitutes the very real politics of organization with its resultant benefits.  He increases his own independence and comfort and that of his family.  He is immune to superstitious belief in and respect for the mysterious power of political or economic nostrums to reconstruct human society according to the Marxian formula.

In rejecting the Marxian hypothesis as superficial and fragmentary, we do so not because of its so-called revolutionary character, its threat to the existing order of things, but rather because of its superficial, emotional and religious character and its deleterious effect upon the life of reason.  Like other schemes advanced by the alarmed and the indignant, it relies too much upon moral fervor and enthusiasm.  To build any social program upon the shifting sands of sentiment and feeling, of indignation or enthusiasm, is a dangerous and foolish task.  On the other hand, we should not minimize the importance of the Socialist movement in so valiantly and so courageously battling against the stagnating complacency of our conservatives and reactionaries, under whose benign imbecility the defective and diseased elements of humanity are encouraged “full speed ahead” in their reckless and irresponsible swarming and spawning.  Nevertheless, as George Drysdale pointed out nearly seventy years ago;

“...  If we ignore this and other sexual subjects, we may do whatever else we like:  we may bully, we may bluster, we may rage, We may foam at the mouth; we may tear down Heaven with our prayers, we may exhaust ourselves with weeping over the sorrows of the poor; we may narcotize ourselves and others with the opiate of Christian resignation; we may dissolve the realities of human woe in a delusive mirage of poetry and ideal philosophy; we may lavish our substance in charity, and labor over possible or impossible Poor Laws; we may form wild dreams of Socialism, industrial