It is the daughters of the poor that become the victims of middle-class lust—­Fantine is the daughter of a working man.  She is multiplied by tens of thousands on the streets of great cities, selling her soul for a morsel of bread.  We are hardened to that and we think we are meriting the approbation of angels when we start a rescue mission for her special class.

How pure in the sight of God is poor Fantine when compared with the cowards who will not smash the mill of which she is the mere grist.  Just so long as there is a cash consideration in her life must capitalism bear the burden of her sin!

There were millions of men out of work last winter.  The political parties took no notice.  The leaders knew the minds of the electors.  They knew that those millions of unemployed were too stupid to see any connection between government and work.

Mr. Taft was asked in the campaign what a workless, homeless man could do to find employment.

“God knows!” was his reply.

Out of this army of the unemployed the ranks of the criminals are reinforced, and the search for creature comforts recruits the ranks of women who are not fallen, but knocked down.  The supreme function of the state is to make it easy for citizens to live in harmony with one another and hard to be out of joint.

Poverty is the mother curse of the ages.  No man suffering from her withering, blighting touch can be in harmony with the best.  Socialism tackles the master job of abolishing it.  Not by any fantastic plan of redistribution but by giving to the creator all that he creates and to the social charges, pensioners and cripples an assurance of life without the stigma of pauperism.

Socialism asks for the application of science to the disease of poverty.  Science has chained the lightning and harnessed the ether waves, it has filled the world with horseless carriages and is now filling the air with machines that fly like birds.  The inventions of the last twenty years are modern miracles but the sunken millions of our fellowmen never speak through a telephone, never ride in an automobile, never send a telegram, never read good books, or see good plays!  They make all these things.  They make them all possible for others, but the enjoyment of them is beyond their wildest dreams!

The strength of the social chain cannot be greater than its weakest link.

Socialists are grouped around the thin places, the leakages, the weaknesses of democracy, and engross themselves in making them strong.  The propaganda in times past wielded only a sword; now it has a trowel.  Socialism is a positive force; it is leaven in the lump.

The party has a discipline which often hampers its own progress, but in the regimentation of an idea discipline can not be dispensed with.  There are Socialists who see only the goal—­are not willing to see anything else or less.  There are others who see every step of the way and emphasize each step.