How Socialism Is Recruited.
As a matter of interest in connection with our study of the restoration of the Papacy, we insert the following from the European letter of the San Francisco Chronicle before referred to:— “What then is the outlook for Socialism, let us say, in France, where it is the most potent and progressive? It has its roots down deep in the sorrows of the people. It lives by discontent. It flourishes even by crime, though the great majority of those who profess its doctrines are by no means criminals. The situation is at the moment favorable to the Socialists. Their recruitment is from various classes besides workingmen. Among these recruits pessimistic writers give the first place to the annually increasing number of persons that come out of the schools and colleges. These young people are unable to find work suited to their capacity. They find it less now than ever, because the commercial8crisis is closing many of the avenues of labor. The bachelors of art are condemned to idleness, misery, discontent, and are easily converted into revolutionary material. “The sons of peasants, reared with difficulty and well educated by their parents, or those of little shop keepers, have no recourse when they graduate. They cannot dig, and to beg they are ashamed, like the man in the parable. The financial speculation of late years is said to have taken almost all the money of the people of small means. Hundreds of them may be seen about the Paris Bourse or in the afternoon studying the stock lists. Thousands have put their money into Panama Canal stock. Countless numbers have put their money in certificates of stock of various kinds which are scarcely worth the paper they are written on. The peasant has been obliged to sell or mortgage his land. The small merchants have, as I have already said, been sorely tried by the depression in business, and by having their trade captured by the great stores or bazaars that sell everything. When a man fails, the law and his neighbors regard him as a criminal. He has no recourse, and enters the discontented and revolutionary classes. “The great banks and money-lending companies are gradually absorbing the real estate. This is resold, perhaps, to peasant purchasers who cannot pay for it, or can only pay a part by using up all their savings and borrowing the rest from the company on credit, which exacts an interest beyond their means. Then comes a bad harvest, and the farm goes probably in default of interest into the hands of the village usurer. So, by all these means, the class of the impoverished is constantly increasing, and each individual considers himself wronged by society. He acquires a hatred for capitalists, and gravitates easily toward the revolutionary class, either as leader or follower, because anything is better than his present misery. And to all these have to be added the criminal classes, whom, if the Socialists seek to accomplish their ends by revolution, they will always find their most efficient allies.”