It often happens that the revolutionists dazzle the eyes of the weary with the vivid pictures that they draw of intolerable civil and economic conditions, whether these be true, false or imaginary. The result is that the poor people frequently brood over the wrongs from which they happen to be suffering. They become so thoroughly discontented and blinded with class hatred that they are no longer able to see the advantage of reforming the present system by constitutional and lawful methods. Finally, when they have almost lost their reason and can no longer realize that the drug offered them has never been proven capable of remedying the evils that weigh heavily upon them, they accept and swallow the poisonous dose of Socialism and become a thousand times more wretched than they were before. The very potion they drink, with a view to being cured, makes them most unhappy for the rest of their lives, and in many cases for all eternity. If there is anything that non-Socialists should be on their guard against it is this base form of tactics by which the revolutionists have been eminently successful in gaining new recruits.
If those whose party emblem is a flaming torch could even prove that everything without exception in the present system of industry is worthy of condemnation, and that the entire government is corrupt to its very core, it would no more follow from this that Socialism was the remedy than it would follow that the solution of one problem in mathematics must be correct because another solution of an entirely different nature was wrong, or that all the eggs in one crate must be good because there were some in a second crate unfit for use.
It is very common for Socialists to assume that certain fundamental principles have been proven to be true, whereas the fact is that these very premises, from which they draw their conclusions, are often false and without the slightest foundation. An excellent illustration of this has already been given in preceding pages, where it was shown that the Socialists incorrectly assumed that there would be no poverty in their state, and argued from this that there would be very little prostitution. It