While such paralyzing influences were working from above, the changes from below would interfere no less with vigorous achievement. Every gateway would be wide open. Socialism would mean a policy opposite to that of the trade unions to-day. They are energetically excluding the unfit. Under the new order the fine day for the unfit would have dawned. At present the socialists feel at home in the system of the unions, because the firm organization of the workingmen through the unions is helpful for their cause. But if that cause wins, the barriers of every union must break down, and the industrial energies of the nation will be scattered in the unimportant work in order to give an equal chance to the unproductive.
Nobody doubts that socialism would overcome some of the obvious weaknesses of the capitalistic era, and those weaknesses may be acknowledged even if we are faithful to our plan and abstract from mere human happiness. If only the objective achievement is our aim, we cannot deny that the millionfold misery from sickness and old age, from accidents at work, and from unemployment through a crisis in trade, from starvation wages, and from losses through fraudulent undertakings, is keeping us from the goal. But has the groaning of this misery remained unheard in these times, when capitalism has been reaching its height? The last two decades have shown that the system of private ownership can be in deepest harmony with all those efforts to alleviate its cruelties in order to strengthen the efficiency of the nation at work. Certainly the socialists themselves deserve credit for much in the great international movement toward the material security of the workingman's social life. It is doubtful whether without her social democrats, Germany, the pioneer in the social insurance movement, would have given to the army of workingmen those protective laws which became the model for England and other nations, and which are beginning to be influential in American thinking, too. The laws against child labour, the efforts for minimum wage rates, and, most important, the worldwide tendency to secure a firm supervision and regulation of the private companies by the state, are characteristic features of the new period in which capitalism triumphs, and yet is freeing itself from cancerous growths which destroy its power for fullest achievement.