all feebleminded individuals should be located early in life and put in colonies where the strain and temptation of ordinary living could be removed, and the breeding of new incompetents prevented. For all normal people not so sheltered, certain minimum living conditions should be guaranteed by the government, so as to prevent the first break in resistance which leads to disaster.

Because all of the economic structure of society is now in flux, we have today a unique opportunity to secure the radical reforms which can guarantee these minimums. Indeed, the principles which we have already accepted for the peace settlement imply such reforms. President Wilson has declared that the United States stands committed to justice, democracy, and protection of the rights of small nations as our unalterable demands in the peace settlement, and he has outlined the application of these ideals to the international problems involved. Consistency requires that America shall face her industrial and economic problems in the same splendid spirit with which she fights the battles of international freedom. Political justice between nations must be founded upon economic justice within the nation. Political democracy must lead to industrial democracy. The rights of the victims of our economic and social maladjustments must be protected as well as the rights of small nations.

Essentials of Economic Justice.

Industrial democracy, economic justice, and the protection of the rights of the weak, imply as corrollaries certain conditions which must be demanded, at the close of the war, as fundamental features of the new social order. Among these essentials are the following:

1. Every child must be assured, without his own gainful labor, adequate nourishment, wholesome housing, sufficient clothing, skilled medical care, and such education and recreation as shall develop his maximum capacity for joyous living, and his greatest serviceability to society.

2. Every able-bodied and able-minded father of a family must be guaranteed the opportunity to earn an income sufficient to assure such a standard of living to his children, and to their mother.

3. The opportunity to earn enough to maintain at least physical and moral health must be assured to all able-bodied and able-minded workers.

4. For workers mentally incompetent to earn a living, cheerful institutional or supervisory care must be provided, with provisions against reproduction of those whose defects are hereditary.

5. Catastrophes, such as sickness, injury, invalidity, old age, death, and unemployment, must be prevented by all the resources of medical and social science; and when they do occur, the resulting economic loss must be borne, not by the worker and his dependents, but by the community, under provisions calculated to encourage prevention, and maintain self-respect.

6. The conditions of production must be so adjusted as to maintain the largest product consistent with the maximum welfare of the workers.

7. The product must be distributed with a view solely to promoting maximum production, to protecting all workers against poverty, and to attaining the maximum possible psychic income for the whole community.

8. The control of industry must be transferred to the whole body of hand and brain workers.

The realization of these fundamental conditions of economic justice requires the solution of many perplexing problems. These problems should, in my opinion, form the basis of our discussions in future years. Sound progress can come about only by finding areas of agreement in the thinking of the people, and then seeking to extend these areas. The spirit of this conference has seemed sympathetic toward such ideals as these. If we as social workers can bring home to the leaders of our communities the necessity for fundamental reform along these lines, we shall accomplish vital service in the cause of economic and industrial justice.

A CRITICISM OF SOCIAL WORK AND THE REFORM PROGRAM IN THE LIGHT OF THE COMPLETE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION DEMANDED BY THE RADICALS

Harold L. Varney, St. Louis

In dealing with the lower strata of the working class, every social service worker cannot help but be struck by the fatuity of his task. Vast funds of energy and effort have been expended to no avail. Gigantic campaigns of uplift have collapsed in a sickening impotence of failure. It is as though all their attempts had been poured into a vast and exhaustless sieve which sucks in the myriad energies of the profession but leaves their object still unattained.

No one recognizes more poignantly than the social service worker himself this failure which has deadened all his effort. It has stung him into thought. It has shaken him forever out of the traditional attitudes of the past. In the consciousness of his disillusionment, he has sought a new method and a new orientation. He has groped in the limbo of social theories seeking new light for his future. He has ceased to be a mere alms giver. He has conceived a higher and weightier mission for his profession. Searching sincerely for the truth, he has swung a broader light upon his work. He has discovered that the poverty which he seeks to remove is inherent in the system of life as it exists; that it is the inevitable corollary to existing modes of economic production; that the feeble efforts of charity are like single rain drops in the parched dryness of a desert.

Armed with this consciousness, the social service worker of today is grappling more and more with causes. He is recognizing, increasingly, that social service, to have a future, must also have a program. That this program must supply some measure of economic reconstruction. That it must be fundamental enough to touch the very roots of poverty. That it must be sweeping enough to offer a self-insurance against the recurrence of the evil. That it shall have a freshness and a simple potency of appeal which shall assure it the momentum of a following. Thus the social service worker is becoming more and more the pioneer in the propaganda of economic reconstruction. And, searching for a creed, the overwhelming majority of the profession have found one in the program of social reform.

And yet, in fairness to the future, the question should be asked at this conference, have the social workers chosen wisely? In the great field of social programs have they selected the highest? Have they found the true vehicle to lead to their ends? Have they linked the future of their profession with that movement which is the most prolific in its offerings of social development and social growth? With the data of the day at my disposal I cannot but answer that social reform is not that program.

It is in the labor movement that the present-day economic solutions have germinated and developed. The war between reform and revolution, "revisionism" and "impossibilism," has long been traditional among the thinkers of the working class. It is right that such should be, for only by a living contact with labor itself can our labor problem be squared to labors' yearnings. By the intimacy of this contact we are pre-assured that these programs are not the mere hot-house imaginings of theorists, but that, on the contrary, they are practical solutions, sprung from the content of labor's experience and hot with all the humanness of labor's passions.

Reform vs. Revolution

In building the future, a sharp line of demarcation has ever been drawn between the reformer and the revolutionist. It is the struggle between two opposite points of view. It is a contest between two fundamental temperaments.

The revolutionist, in the working class sense of the word, seeks an abrupt and fundamental rupture with the status quo of the present. He believes that the existing individualistic, capitalist mode of production is faulty and he would extirpate it. His faith admits of no compromise. He sees capitalism as a wholeness and he would destroy it as a wholeness. No small segment of the existing order shall be carried over into the new to taint and pollute the future. And the new society (socialism, the cooperative commonwealth, industrial democracy, or by whatever name he seeks to style it), he visualizes as a completed and irrefragible entity. He is the foe of all that savors of the present—its narrow conventions, its petticoating shams, its commercialized arts, its vulgarized ethics. He views capitalism as a vast tree—a upas tree of mephitic shadows, shooting out its poisonous branches and polluting every sanctuary of life. And his logic admits of no other solution than the obvious solution, that to destroy the branches we should first of all destroy the tree.

The reformer, on the contrary, while he accepts the same theory of ultimate reconstruction, while he derives from Marxism and subscribes to its economics, differs fundamentally in all of his attitudes. Capitalism is an evil, he reasons, but it is also a condition. We must accept that condition and work with it rather than against it. We must endeavor to mold the existing society gradually toward the new. We must saturate it without ideas and fertilize it with new viewpoints. And thus gradually, on the loom of time, will be woven the woof of the new society.

Social Work and the Reform Program

But unfortunately, because of the very weaknesses of the reformistic school, the social workers have arrayed themselves upon that side. The very characteristics which vitiate reformism for the worker, seem to be accepted as recommendations for the social service profession. The attitude of conciliation; the easy tolerance of contradictory tenets; the tacit acceptance of capitalism and the effort to limit their program to its requirements; the placid and hypocritical legality of their tactics; all these inconsistencies seem to make reformism attractive to the social worker. Is it not an added commentary upon the unbridgable chasm between labor and the middle class, that the very qualities in a movement which repel labor, seem to make that movement attractive to labor's would-be friends?

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Entering the labor movement, the social service worker chooses that wing which reconciles him most closely to his previous beliefs. It enables him to cling resolutely to the framework of capitalism. It gives full play to the tinkering instrumentalities which he has been taught to use in his study at the university. He feels that he is groping for the new while his feet are still resolutely planted upon economic well-being under the old. He can accept with the least degree of risk and at the smallest cost of personal sacrifice. And so he can feel that he is doing his part, but what does he know of the broken, sobbing lives which cry out from a thousand slums for a socialism that shall come today?

State Socialism vs. Industrial Democracy

And so, after this first parting of the ways, reformist and revolutionist have drifted still more widely apart. At first, the distinction was one of temperament and tactics. Now, it has become a more serious one; it has become a contrast even of programs. No longer do the reformists and the revolutionists seek the same goal. Their aims have branched apart. And here again, I must attribute the cleavage to the meddlesome influence of the well-meaning middle-classer.

Reformist today stands fully committed to a policy of state socialism, or statism. The revolutionists stand, as ever, for a pure industrial democracy. And the conflict between them has shifted to these grounds.

The distinction between state socialism and industrial democracy is the most fundamental distinction that could be drawn. They represent the two polarities of economic reconstruction. It is the contrast between a survived enhancement of all the evils of the day, and a truly democratic reconstruction. It is the antithesis between slavery and freedom.

A brief summary will clear the point. State socialism, or state capitalism, as revolutionists love to call it, is merely a new form of the present system. The state becomes the capitalist; the individual owner fades into the background. More scientific perhaps than individual capitalism, it is far more dangerous and menacing. It establishes an impersonal bureaucracy and administers industry by a makeshift contrivance of a geographically elected political government. For the boss it substitutes the politician and it leaves no buffer government, as today, to hold the scales of justice in between. It penalizes unionism and throttles the hopes of a naturally developed democracy.

Industrial democracy incarnates the socialist ideal. It is orthodoxly Marxian although it is formulated with all the interpretative data of the day. It posits a condition where industry will be democratically managed, where life will be reconstructed on an industrial basis, where all mankind will be classified upon the spokes of an economic wheel. It would sweep away the political government in its entirety, with ninetenths of the political functions. For the geographical form of government it would substitute an industrial parliament, representatively chosen by parallel economic groups. The one man autocracy in the factories would give way before a democratic control, and industrial unionism would constitute the vehicle of administration.

About such an idea there is nothing striking or visionary. For what is industrial democracy but the logical extension of principles already acknowledged? What rule of logic is this which accepts democracy as theoretically correct and then studiously proceeds to limit it to merely political functions? If democracy be feasible, why stop at the factory door? Why hesitate to allow to labor the right to elect foremen and bosses when you have already accorded him the right to elect presidents? Why say that labor can vote for beneficial legislation through the clumsy machinery of legislatures and referendums and then slam a refusal in his face when he attempts to pass a law to govern his long hours in the factory?

Labor's Underlying Struggle

And yet, even when this distinction between state socialism and industrial democracy is made plain, the social service workers rally overwhelmingly around the state socialistic position. Is it from failure to