Another thing must be clearly understood.  In spite of the fact that middle-class men and professional men are interested in the movement, it is nevertheless a distinctly working-class revolt.  The world over, it is a working-class revolt.  The workers of the world, as a class, are fighting the capitalists of the world, as a class.  The so-called great middle class is a growing anomaly in the social struggle.  It is a perishing class (wily statisticians to the contrary), and its historic mission of buffer between the capitalist and working-classes has just about been fulfilled.  Little remains for it but to wail as it passes into oblivion, as it has already begun to wail in accents Populistic and Jeffersonian-Democratic.  The fight is on.  The revolution is here now, and it is the world’s workers that are in revolt.

Naturally the question arises:  Why is this so?  No mere whim of the spirit can give rise to a world-revolution.  Whim does not conduce to unanimity.  There must be a deep-seated cause to make 7,000,000 men of the one mind, to make them cast off allegiance to the bourgeois gods and lose faith in so fine a thing as patriotism.  There are many counts of the indictment which the revolutionists bring against the capitalist class, but for present use only one need be stated, and it is a count to which capital has never replied and can never reply.

The capitalist class has managed society, and its management has failed.  And not only has it failed in its management, but it has failed deplorably, ignobly, horribly.  The capitalist class had an opportunity such as was vouchsafed no previous ruling class in the history of the world.  It broke away from the rule of the old feudal aristocracy and made modern society.  It mastered matter, organized the machinery of life, and made possible a wonderful era for mankind, wherein no creature should cry aloud because it had not enough to eat, and wherein for every child there would be opportunity for education, for intellectual and spiritual uplift.  Matter being mastered, and the machinery of life organized, all this was possible.  Here was the chance, God-given, and the capitalist class failed.  It was blind and greedy.  It prattled sweet ideals and dear moralities, rubbed its eyes not once, nor ceased one whit in its greediness, and smashed down in a failure as tremendous only as was the opportunity it had ignored.

But all this is like so much cobwebs to the bourgeois mind.  As it was blind in the past, it is blind now and cannot see nor understand.  Well, then, let the indictment be stated more definitely, in terms sharp and unmistakable.  In the first place, consider the caveman.  He was a very simple creature.  His head slanted back like an orang-outang’s, and he had but little more intelligence.  He lived in a hostile environment, the prey of all manner of fierce life.  He had no inventions nor artifices.  His natural efficiency for food-getting was, say, 1.  He did not even till the soil.  With his natural efficiency of 1, he fought off his carnivorous enemies and got himself food and shelter.  He must have done all this, else he would not have multiplied and spread over the earth and sent his progeny down, generation by generation, to become even you and me.