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Dear Mr. Smith,

I am glad that you have asked me if the soap-box orator told the truth when he said that all the arguments against Socialism are either “lies” or “foolish misrepresentations.”

The soap-box orator wants you to believe that all the wise men in this world are Socialists, and that those who do not accept the teachings of Karl Marx are either ignoramuses or wicked men.

You tell me that your “common sense” teaches you that “there are two sides to every question.” This statement shows that you are an honest and a practical man. You say that you are a worker, a trade unionist, a Christian—all of which means that you are a good citizen. These frank statements are the best introduction you could offer. It is this kind of man who insists upon having “facts,” and who is not likely to be carried away by theories—even by plausible theories. He insists upon knowing that there are plenty of “facts” to back up the theories before he accepts them.

Hence, I am going to write to you at some length—to you and to all the rest of the John Smiths. In these letters I shall express myself as simply and as clearly as possible. I shall give you plenty of facts—“the hardest of hard facts”—and a mass of cold, logical reasons that cannot fail to appeal to “robust common sense” and the “love of fair play.”

As you have said, there are two sides to every question, and the question of Socialism is no exception to this rule. The reason that the soap-box orator attracts so large a crowd is because he tells the people who listen to him a lot of things which they know are true.

He tells them, for example, that wages and the expense of living have not kept equable pace with each other—that the smaller rate of wage which the worker received fifteen or twenty years ago may really have been a higher rate of wage because the man who got it was able to buy more with it. He tells us that it is a bad thing that children should be compelled to work for a living at an age when they ought to be in school or playing the games which nature intends children shall play. He points to the employer as he rides by in his $4,000 touring car, and he asks how long it has been since you have had a ride in an automobile. He reads to you the newspaper report of an elaborate dinner given by “society women” to their poodle dogs, and supplements it with another item, from the same paper, telling the number of people who have died of starvation during the past six months. With eloquent words, vibrant with sympathy, he paints a picture that makes your blood boil with indignation, and the worst of it is that the things he describes are true.

Every man, if his heart is in the proper place, knows that things are not right. He knows that there are plenty of workers to-day who do not earn money enough to enable them to live decently. He knows that workingmen do not make their wives and children toil in the factories for the mere joy of knowing that they are not idle. The worker is not so blind to the advantages of education, that he does not want to see his children well-educated. If he insists upon their going to work instead of to school, it is because he needs the few dollars which they can earn to supplement somewhat his own too meagre wage.

The worker is justified in not being satisfied with his lot. If a man is treated unjustly, he has a moral right to protest; and I am the last person who would wish to deny him that right. At the same time, I am going to take exception to one statement that the soap-box orator makes. He tells us that Socialism is the one and only solution of all the industrial and social evils of the world. He asserts that, if enough of us will vote the Socialist ticket, we can get the industries away from their present owners and own them ourselves, paying ourselves for our labor by taking all the profits that now go to the men who furnish the capital to carry on the business.

If this were true—and that were all there was to it—I might be a Socialist. It is because it is impossible for it to be true that I am writing these letters; and, before I have finished, I think you will admit that I shall have proved that the soap-box orator is talking “through his hat.”

I do not ask you to reject the teachings of Socialism because they are new or untried. Every good thing was new once, and I am not so foolish as to imagine that every possibly-good thing has been tried. Indeed, a great many ideas and inventions that have proved of the greatest advantage to the world were once denounced as impracticable. The telephone is one of them. I can remember the time when the best business men laughed at the idea of anybody’s buying stock in a telephone company; they admitted that people could talk over the wire, but it was impossible to make them believe that the instrument could be made strong enough to carry the sound of the human voice more than a few blocks. They said it was all right as a “toy,” but that it had no “commercial utility”—which meant that they did not think they could make any money out of it.

To tell the truth, some of the basic ideas in Socialism are not at all new. They are very, very old; but, if they were as old as a dozen Methuselahs, this fact would not make them any more true. It is not the age of a theory that makes it true; it is the principle underlying it. And I propose to show you that, instead of being the combination of all wisdom, the principles of Socialism are so unreasonable that it is difficult to understand how any thinking man can accept them.

To prove this, I shall resort chiefly to facts and very little to theoretical argument. I shall not ask you to believe that a thing is so, merely because I say that it is so. When I present an argument, I shall explain all the facts upon which it is based, and you may consider the argument on its own merits.

In doing this, I must ask you to forget yourself. A prominent Socialist writer has told us that it is necessary to “get out of the body to think.” As he explains, “that means that when a problem is before you, you should not let any personal prejudice, or class feeling, come between that problem and your mind; that you should consider a case upon the evidence alone, as a jury should.”

I shall be satisfied if you will follow this advice. I can ask you to do no more than to forget your own condition, your own troubles, your own life-problems, and consider this question simply as a man—as a jury-man, if you will. If you were asked to figure how much you can earn in three days and two hours and fifteen minutes at your present rate of wage, you would not think whether you were a Republican or a Democrat, would you? You would simply apply the rules of arithmetic to your sum, and I ask you to read my letters and decide, by the same kind of unbiased judgment, whether I am right or wrong.

By way of anticipation, let me assert that it is possible for us to solve every problem that confronts us to-day without resorting to the proposed “remedy” of Socialism. We have here a country, big enough and productive enough to give all the people plenty of room and all they want to eat. There are facilities to supply all the children with a good education and ample opportunities for recreation. The fact that so many of the people do not succeed in securing plenty, shows that something is wrong. But, is the “wrong” in our system of industry, or are we ourselves—and, when I say “we,” I mean the whole people, not you and me alone—to blame for these conditions? That is the important question.

Socialism promises that it will right all wrongs and asserts that this cannot be done in any other way. I do not believe that Socialism could “make good,” and it is here my task to prove it.