"Ever since the Socialist Party was formed," he wrote, "the party office-holders have been spending the larger part of their energies in endeavoring to hold their jobs and to fight down every element in the party that demanded any improvement or advance in any direction....
"A far greater danger is the new one, that has become serious only since we entered upon the present period of political success two years ago, namely the corruption of the party by those elected to public office....
"Only last year we had several mayors in the one state of Ohio either being forced to resign or deserting the party because they could not use it for their purpose....
"Next year we may elect a few congressmen and half a hundred legislators--if the reactionaries in the party will cease their underhand efforts to disrupt the organization and drive out the revolutionists....
"If then these office-holders continue to show the tendency towards bossism so common in the past, the Socialist Party will soon become an office-holders' machine, little different in character from the machine by which Gompers controls the Federation of Labor, or Murphy, Tammany Hall....
"The only possible way to avoid a split so openly and shamelessly advocated by some of the opportunist leaders of our party--Berger even threatened it in the last National Convention--is to have the system of proportional representation....
"Unless some such changes as these are made in the next four years, it does not take a prophet to see that there would be nothing left of what we now know as the Socialist Party. If we cannot control our own petty autocrats, how can we ever hope to control the infinitely more powerful and resourceful autocrats of the Capitalist system?"