are not confined to any one department of human activity. The test of democracy is not that each individual citizen or party member shall be familiar with the details of every problem facing the part or the body politic. The test is in having the intelligence -the old-fashioned quality known as "umption"-to call, to the service of all, the most efficient individuals for the performance of any certain duty.

We have learned this lesson in many things but we need to learn it in everything else. If we desire that a food product sha!! be analyzed for the detection of poisonous elements we go to a chemist and not a mechanical engineer. Why, then, if we desire an efficient secretary for a party "local" should we not choose a comrade familiar with letter writing and office system instead of "honoring" some comrade with no knowledge whatever of such things?

Of course it is not always a simple matter to determine what comrade can discharge a given task most efficiently and we can rely upon only one rule: Efficiency produces order and results; inefficiency produces disorder and lack of results. Efficiency spells success; inefficiency spells failure. We are prone to denounce "business" and everything connected with it as evil, but the party will not begin to do what it may do until it adopts business methods of organization and applies the business principle of getting the best man for the accomplishment of a certain work. This must be observed not only in selecting comrades to attend to the various details of party work but in the nomination of candidates as well. Even if we have not the ghost of a show of winning we are derelict in selecting candidates if we do not act with a view to the most effective discharge of the duties of the office for which nomination is made.

Our movement has demagogues just as the old parties have them and while there is precious poor picking in the movement in the way of "graft" these demagogues all too often monopolize the "honors" attached to party position and stand in the way of comrades with special and technical equipment who should be drafted to perform the party's work. It is these demagogues who are responsible for the grotesque misapplication of many of the noble principles of democracy. They breed dissension and distrust by shouting that the collective wisdom of the party, or any subdivision thereof, is greater than the wisdom of any individual party member. That is only a half truth. In a day of specialization one party member with expert knowledge on any particular subject may know more than all the rest of the party membership composed of men not familiar with that subject. It may be a severely technical subject requiring years to master it. Does democracy demand that we shall not avail ourselves of this one man's knowledge until all the rest of the party membership

have gone to school and mastered that particular subject? Preposterous, of course, but we go right along doing things of the same sort in our party organization. We demand, for instance, that all committees shall be elected, instead of being appointed, when the chances are that the chairman enjoys a familiarity with the qualifications of certain members for service on that particular committee that the bulk of the members in the meeting might not be able to acquire in weeks. I would be the last one to deny the necessity for placing the proper safeguards about the exercise of power, but those safeguards lie in seeing that power, when it is exercised, inures to the collective good. Let the chairman appoint his committee. The function of the collectivity is wisely to select the chairman. If the collectivity hasn't the intelligence to select one honest and efficient chairman why, in the name of common sense, should it be credited with the intelligence to select three or any other number of honest and efficient committeemen?

We are simply compelled to delegate power to individuals equipped by training in college, office or shop for the efficient discharge of certain work. If we do not so delegate power we will be a mob undeserving the consideration of civilized men. Accordingly we must sternly rebuke the disposition to question. the honesty or efficiency of any party member simply because he does not happen to be a factory worker. Similarly we must rebuke any disposition to question the honesty or efficiency of the factory worker as such. The horny-handed proletarian, however, is already standing proudly on the pedestal and needs no defense. I have no disposition to pull him down because he is a factory worker, but if he is inefficient, and is hurting the party by his conspicuous position, I will pull him down instanter if it is in my power even though he belongs to all the trade unions. If the most efficient man to take his place should happen to be an intellectual-a brain worker engaged in work not susceptible of the trade union form of organization-I would as promptly elevate him to the position of prominence.

In the sense of availing ourselves of the superior wisdom and efficiency of our gifted individual party members we must have "leaders" and "leadership" and we should be proud and happy to honor those who render exceptional service. Just now we need trained fighters and captains as we shall need trained administrators in the Co-operative Commonwealth. Give me, with the rest of the collectivity, the power of keeping a check on the leaders to compel them to serve us all and I, for one, will prefer following a Moses into the Promised Land to wandering leaderless forever in the Wilderness where the manna long ago ceased to fall. CHARLES DOBBS.

Pause and Consider.

OCIALIST unity has been urged in the United States since the Paris Congress affirmed by resolution that the desirable thing would be one united party in each country.

In this resolution the Congress merely expressed what all sincere socialists desire. We all want unity. So do we all want Socialism. But there is many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip. Between the thing we want and the existing conditions there stretches away a long line of years, in which we must learn how to get the thing we want. And most of us have yet to learn that just as the development from Capitalism to Socialism is a historical growth, so is the development from working class division to working class unity a process of historical develop

ment.

You can't get Socialism by mere resolution. Neither can you get socialist unity or labor union unity by mere resolution. That is, you can't get it that way until the time is ripe for it, and then a resolution to that effect is simply a recognition of facts which have become inevitable. But merely to pass a resolution expressing a desire for a certain thing without at the same time indicating the way in which the desire may be accomplished is more harmful than useful.

Our ideas are not wholly and solely controlled by economic conditions. Quite aside from the fact that earth's nature and the universe prove often stronger, and are in certain respects always stronger, than economic conditions in human societies, there is also the further fact that often past traditions and the habit of shallow thinking "weigh like a nightmare upon the brains of the living". For this reason Marx wisely said no more than that in the last analysis the economic conditions determine the general trend of human ideas.

Thus it may happen that some of our ideas run directly in opposition to the demands made by economic conditions upon our reason. This may lead us into pitfalls, from which we cannot extricate ourselves until after long suffering and with the loss of the results of years of patient and hard work for Socialism.

Every socialist with the merest smattering of Marx knows that it is an evidence of utopian thought to attempt to get Socialism at a time when Capitalism has just begun, or even before that. But it is no less utopian to attempt to get socialist unity

at a time when the whole socialist movement is still torn apart by such wide differences upon points of tactics, that nothing but a misunderstanding of fundamental principles can account for

them.

Of course, even a disagreement on points of principle need not necessarily be an obstacle to the accomplishment of unity. But the first prerequisite in such a case is that all sides show a spirit of conciliation and a willingness to discuss questions of principle in a scientific manner with a view to convincing either the one or the other side and bringing one of them to the acceptance of the views of the other. It is evident, that even this would require years of discussion and a mutual preparation of minds on both sides for united work, before unity could be actually inaugurated.

So long as one side claims to be absolutely in the right, as the spokesmen of the Socialist Labor Party do, so long as these comrades speak with dogmatic authority in the name of Marx, whom they misrepresent, so long as they claim that the Socialist Labor Party is the only truly revolutionary labor organization in the land, so long as they urge unity with the professed intention of "regenerating" the Socialist Party and rescuing its ranks and file from the pernicious and traitorous influence of "fakirs, compromisers", etc., etc., in short, so long as they persist in their policy of slander, misrepresentation, dogmatism, intolerance, conceit and presumption, which they have followed in the past, just so long is the basis for even the preliminary ground work of unity lacking.

This is said without a shadow of an insinuation that the comrades of the Socialist Labor Party are insincere, or that their spokesmen are doubledealers. On the contrary, I believe that the majority of them are earnest and enthusiastic workers for the cause. But they are under the influence of men, who, though they may be sincere socialists, are by nature intolerant, bigoted, unscrupulous, slanderous, narrowmindedly fanatic, and above all incapable of grasping the meaning of the Marxian theories.

I can affirm this last fact without exposing myself to the objection that I am claiming for the Socialist Party what I would deny to the Socialist Labor Party. We have the testimony of Engels himself to prove that the Socialist Labor Party under the theoretical leadership of its present teachers is not in line with Marxism, while the Socialist Party represents Marx and him as they wished to be represented.

For instance, on September 30, 1891. Engels wrote to comrade F. A. Sorge: "The 'People' is not worth looking at. For a long time I have not met with a paper so full of ridiculous trash." The "People" was then under the same intellectual leadership which led the Socialist Labor Party to combat the

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existing trade unions and which left the wrecks of many a good and promising working class organization in its wake.

At the time when Engels wrote this letter, the element controlled by the dogmatists of the Socialist Labor Party were boycotting Engels' works and vilifying and slandering those who were working in co-operation with him. The "People" was paraded as the only true Marxian paper, and the papers supported by Engels were subjected to all sorts of aspersions and sneers questioning their scientific standing.

No wonder that Engels wrote to Sorge on May 12, 1894: "The Social Democratic Federation (England) shares with your German American socialists the distinction of being the only parties that have accomplished the feat of reducing the Marxian theory of development to a rigid orthodoxy, into which the working people are not supposed to work themselves up out of their own class feeling, but which they are to swallow at once as an article of faith and without any development."

Schlüter was then carrying on a controversy in the "Volkszeitung" against the "Vorwärts", the German organ of the Socialist Labor Party, and Engels stood with him and his co-workers in the entire fight against the Socialist Labor Party. If necessary, the complete proofs of this state of affairs can be supplied in such a way as to settle for ever the assumption of those leaders of the Socialist Labor Party, who claim to be speaking in the name of Marx.

Of

If, then, the Socialist Labor Party does not represent Marxian Socialism correctly, if its leaders do not work in harmony with the expressed views of Engels, they must necessarily be representing a Socialism peculiarly their own. course, that cannot be counted against them. Marxism itself is still in its beginnings as a theory, and it leaves plenty of room for further development. Since neither Marx nor Engels has ever claimed to be the embodiment of all wisdom, the younger generations of socialists have vast opportunities for contributing new and fertile ideas to the ground work laid by the founders of scientific Socialism. But before we can build anything new upon this foundation, we must have understood the old. A good many controversies might have been spared to us, if all sides had been able to bear this in mind and realize its significance. Many of the new claims advanced by some of the younger socialists against some theories of Marx were based upon a misunderstanding of his position. On the other hand, some claims made by younger men on a sound basis were refuted by the older Marxians in a way which bore the earmarks of shallow reading and preconceived aversion.

Certainly most of us younger men have still much to learn about the theories of Marx. And even if we have grasped some