While the possession either of wealth or family tradition was always the basis of class distinction, the industrial revolution brought with it the enormously multiplied power of capital and the glorification of riches. The proletarians multiplied rapidly in number, and all the evils of sharp class distinction were heightened. In all lands where capitalistic production spread, the two classes grew farther apart, the distinction between possessor and wage-earner increased.
It is not the mere possession of wealth, however, which forms the animus of the Socialist movement. It is probably not even the abuse of this wealth, although this is a large factor in the problem. It is the psychological effect of the capitalist system that is the real enginery of Socialism. It is the class feeling, the consciousness of the workingman that he is contributing muscle and blood and sweat to the perfection of an article whose possession he does not share. This feeling is aroused by the contrasts of life that the worker constantly sees around him. He feels that his own life energy has contributed to the magnificent equipages and the palatial luxuries of his employer. He compares his own lot and that of his family with the lot of the capitalist. This feeling of envy is not blunted by the kaleidoscopic suddenness with which changes of fortune can take place in America to-day. By some stroke of luck or piece of ingenious planning, a receiver of wages to-day may be the giver of wages to-morrow.
Nor does the spread of education and intelligence dull the contrasts. It greatly heightens them. The workman can now begin to analyze the conditions under which he lives. He ponders over the distinctions that are actual and contrasts them with his imagined utopia. To him the differences between employer and employee are not natural. He does not attribute them to any fault or shortcoming or inferiority of his own, nor of his master, but to a flaw in the organization of society. The social order is wrong.
The workingman has become the critic. Here you have the heart of Socialism. Whatever form its outward aspect may take, at heart it is a rebellion against things as they are. And whatever may be the syllogisms of its logic, or the formularies of its philosophy, they all begin with a grievance, that things as they are are wrong; and they all end in a hope for a better society of to-morrow where the inequalities shall somehow be made right.