If the Government Could Control
THE Socialists are making considerable comment on the fact that the United States government maintains its soldiers at an average cost, for rations, of thirty cents a day. The government, so they claim, can do this because of its peculiar opportunities for buying; and this is urged as reason for the government ownership of the various lines of commerce and manufacture. There may be a point to this. However that may be, we leave others to argue it out. But we feel constrained to call attention to the many different kinds of texts that are furnished in this time for discontentment. This is only one of them. When it is affirmed that the government as a great buyer can secure food so cheaply as to be able to feed its men well for thirty cents a day, that naturally produces dissatisfaction. We may not blame men for being dissatisfied when there is so much cause for reasonable and possibly just complaint; but it does seem absurd, in the light of history, to think that regardless of the slumbering embers of revolution, men should believe that the world is standing in the dawning of the opening day of a golden age. When habits of thought or expression become popular, men will utter and repeat them without a seeming realization of what they are saying; and for this reason we find the vast majority talking that the world is getting better and better, when everybody knows, when they stop to consider, that there are discussions on every hand which are the forerunners of revolution and strife.