St. Paul daily globe. [volume] (Saint Paul, Minn.) 1884-1896, 1896-01-12
THE LINE OF DIVISION.

courses warm blood or under which
there beats a heart vita any Of the
milk of human kindness in it. Even
the hard, grasping, selfish man makes
peace with what conscience he has by
permitting his fancy to indulge in the
pleasures of munifcent liberality,
though he may never permit his pocket
to share the pleasure with his mag
nation. There are, probably, the low
and sensual and brutal who cannot be
SO classed, but they are reincarnations
exhausting their chances for spiritual
uplifting All others are socialists; d
term that, as it is getting to be better
understood, loses the significance of
iconoclasm that attached to it until
quite recently.
The man, or, for the matter of that,
the woman, too, is a socialist who
senses the evils of the conditions of life,
who realizes that men have not yet
learned to be just to one another, and
who looks to a time when justice shall
men are humane when the golden
rule is the rule of action in all lives,
and when there shall be equality in
fact among men. Here, unwittingly
the socialist touches elbow with the
dreaded and despised anarchist, who
dreams of a time when there will be
no need of law or government because
men will be Just. All reformers are
thus socialists, whatever their field Of
effort. The inventor, consciously or
not, falls among these, for he helps
better the conditions OF life. Good gov
eminent clubs, striving to make public
life purer, are socialists, and those who
profess faith in the doctrines Of the
Sermon on the Mount fall within the
classification
But there is one difference that sep
arates all these into two great di-
visions. Every person entitled to the
term belongs to one or the other. The
and across it many fly backwards and
forwards, but still the line is dis
tinct and strongly marked. The dis
tinction is between the impatient and
the patient socialist. The impatient So
cialist is the one we hear the most Of,
who makes society most uncom-
fortable with his mutations, his up
braidings, his diatribes and his in
cessant and futile activity. He is Of
all colors and degrees. He is a phil
anthropist and a demagogue He or
ganizes societies and b1sieges legis-
latures. He has spasms of indignation
provoked by some eruption of cussed-
ness. or breaks out now and then over
bad conditions that are continuous like
gambling or corruption.
He goes into politics and wants to
reform things. He would obliterate
1ntemperance by removing it's second
airy cause, the supply of liquor leaving
the first cause, the depraved tastes Of
men, untouched. He has immense
faith in the efficacy Of enactments and
the puissance of government He learns
nothing in this from history or ex-
perience, but, on every occasion, pre-
scribes his "be it enacted" In an
other way he worships industries; that
is, some industries. Purely and solely,
of course, for the common veal, he
wants them either built up or kept up
after being built, the cost, borne by
all, being compensated by the ability
to point with pride to what "we' have
accomplished. And so on up and down
the long list Of movements, sometimes
going parallel, at others at criss-cross.
and sometimes colliding, but with con-
ditions remaining just about as bad as
before the members began their efforts.
There is an immensely disproportionate
expenditure Of energy to results, but,
in the divine scheme, it is probably es-
sential that this sort of people should
have some escape valve. The milder
explosions are less dangerous than
would be those were there no present
vent.
On the other side are the patient
socialists. They are a rather phil
osophical set having supply Of
what men term common sense, which is
merely the faculty of seeing things
as they really are. They see as clearly,
possibly more clearly, than do their
brothers on the other side of the di-
viding line, the evils Of life, and are
fully as regretful that they exist. But
they take counsel of the past, with it's
deep lessons, and apply them to the
present. They know that the world
has come up out of the depths of bar
barrie brutality, and that the course is
still upward with accelerating pace.
The world is better than it has ever
been. History is full of it's instruction
in the futility of legislation. In spite
of this rather than by it's aid, progress
has come, and it is only by the gradual
humanizing of the Individual
If the world is better than it ever
was, it is because men are juster, not
because laws have been enacted BY
the process by which society has moved
up it must go on up. What of evil
there is is because men are evil, not be-
cause governments are good. In one
way and another, by Christian teach
ing, by better environments, by the
influence Of example. by a growing
consciousness that right conduct is bet
ter, humanity, that is, civilized hui