“In the communications sent me by various labor organizations protesting against the retention of Miller in the Government Printing Office, the grounds alleged are twofold:  1, that he is a non-union man; 2, that he is not personally fit.  The question of his personal fitness is one to be settled in the routine of administrative detail, and cannot be allowed to conflict with or to complicate the larger question of governmental discrimination for or against him or any other man because he is or is not a member of a union.  This is the only question now before me for decision; and as to this my decision is final.”

Because of things I have done on behalf of justice to the workingman, I have often been called a Socialist.  Usually I have not taken the trouble even to notice the epithet.  I am not afraid of names, and I am not one of those who fear to do what is right because some one else will confound me with partisans with whose principles I am not in accord.  Moreover, I know that many American Socialists are high-minded and honorable citizens, who in reality are merely radical social reformers.  They are oppressed by the brutalities and industrial injustices which we see everywhere about us.  When I recall how often I have seen Socialists and ardent non-Socialists working side by side for some specific measure of social or industrial reform, and how I have found opposed to them on the side of privilege many shrill reactionaries who insist on calling all reformers Socialists, I refuse to be panic-stricken by having this title mistakenly applied to me.

None the less, without impugning their motives, I do disagree most emphatically with both the fundamental philosophy and the proposed remedies of the Marxian Socialists.  These Socialists are unalterably opposed to our whole industrial system.  They believe that the payment of wages means everywhere and inevitably an exploitation of the laborer by the employer, and that this leads inevitably to a class war between those two groups, or, as they would say, between the capitalists and the proletariat.  They assert that this class war is already upon us and can only be ended when capitalism is entirely destroyed and all the machines, mills, mines, railroads and other private property used in production are confiscated, expropriated or taken over by the workers.  They do not as a rule claim—­although some of the sinister extremists among them do—­that there is and must be a continual struggle between two great classes, whose interests are opposed and cannot be reconciled.  In this war they insist that the whole government—­National, State and local—­is on the side of the employers and is used by them against the workmen, and that our law and even our common morality are class weapons, like a policeman’s club or a Gatling gun.