stealing their thunder. The Nationalist Organ at Washington paralleled the Socialist and the new Roosevelt platforms to prove what valuable plunder the colonel had stolen from their camp. Yet Mr. Walling finds no item in Mr. Roosevelt's list that is in any intelligible sense socialistic. He writes:
Mr. Roosevelt's programme is, in the Socialist view, neither populistic nor socialistic in the slightest degree, but capitalistic. He has not appropriated a single Socialist demand. He has merely taken up certain measures the Socialists took from other radicals. These measures were placed on our programme because it was seen that they were capable of immediate realization, because though previously neglected, they might be accepted by the majority of capitalists without any loss to themselves or any necessary danger to the capitalist system.
To this the "National Socialist" replies through Mr. Ghent: "Mr. Walling would have come somewhat nearer the facts by saying just the opposite of what he here asserts. It is ridiculous to maintain that Roosevelt's programme is in no degree Socialistic." The editorial raises the great shade of Marx himself, who says that these reform measures "are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production." (August 24, 1912.)
The issue here seems to me obviously against Mr. Walling and those who hold with him. It is "ridiculous to maintain that Roosevelt's programme is in no degree Socialistic." The whole syndicalist flouting of "reforms" and the service they have performed, and are likely to perform, is, I think, just as obviously a mistaken view, but its emphasis is a hall-mark of Syndicalism. Its ideas became heady and extreme,
