Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill Its Conflict With The Basic PrinciPles Of Democracy And Religion In the course of a conversation during the past winter one of the members of the present city government of New York remarked that although he was not a Socialist, yet he failed to see how the elec tion of Morris HillquiL on his un-Ameri- "can platform to be Mayor of New York would have had any result except as regards the national safety and the immediate influence upon our international relations. He added that the life of the city would have gone on just the same for a time at least; hence why the great fear of Socialism? What this man failed to see was that in fact the life of the city wouldgo on for a time without change only on account of the impetus the former democratic government had given. That the policy of individual responsibility and judgment, which had always been the professed aim of American government in the past, had produced leadership and popular experience by the process of natural selection, and that this leadership would last only until the time that the deadening influence of Socialism had its true effect. Let us consider for a moment the result of Socialism as a permanent policy. It , means the substitution, as already shown, of government or official judgment and , initiative for that of the individual. The whole process would be one to deaden and atrophy the powers of the people in general, with the result that there would follow a leveling down to a plane of medio- crity rather than a leveling up according to individual capacities and ambitions, exercised through equality of opportunity. It should not be forgotten that the varying degrees of success in the different walks of life finally have caused so-called social differences. These differences result from the attempt...