SANITY IN SOCIAL AGITATION 343
extend. I mean the insurance of laborers by laborers, and of labor organizations by labor organizations, just as fire- and life- insurance companies underwrite each other, and just as corpora- tions in a trust secure each other.
A few days ago an invitation to buy a life-insurance policy came to me on a letter-head bearing the legend " Scientific Social- ism." The solicitor represented one of the best-known old- line companies. I am surprised, not that a wide-awake insurance agent at last has the wit to call the business " scientific social- ism," but that all the companies have not long ago exploited this idea for what it is worth. The explanation probably is that the old-line insurance companies have been doing business chiefly with the conservative element of our population, at any rate with those who could command a surplus, and among these people panic is likely at the bare mention of socialism. The fact is, however, that insurance is thoroughly scientific socialism, and, conversely, all the feasible socialism that I know anything about is at bottom scientific insurance.
Still further, cooperation, profit-sharing, and other forms of industrial partnership may not have satisfied their most sanguine friends, but they have not yet been worked to the limit. The claims of the laborer to a share of proprietorship in the business are by no means settled. We have not heard the last of income tax, and inheritance tax, and we might indefinitely extend the list with specifications which have been found available in the interest of fairer distribution.
In view of these facts, my second main proposition is this, viz., so much discovery having been made, reform is neverthe- less not at once and directly feasible. There must in most cases be a long, hard, intermediate process of persuasion. In any case where a way of carrying on business more justly has been discovered the lesson has to be taught to other people in like lines of business. The news has to be carried. People have to be told that something has been tried in a business like theirs, and that it has worked. Then they have to be persuaded to try it themselves.
Just after the Pullman strike in 1893, I was a member of a
