was expected to happen, and nothing ever turns out the way it was planned.
But there is a more fundamental law—that of the destructive power of force, which always defeats itself. For their reliance was on force—and how quietly they, or the most virile of them, entered upon their last phase in their acceptance of the doctrine of force as preached now everywhere by the I. W. W. agitator on the curbstone! Sometimes after all the law does not take a thousand years to work itself out.
It seemed to me that the single taxers had a scheme far better than that of the Socialists, since they suggested a reliance on the democratic, and not on the authoritarian theory, though in its mysterious progress, in its constant development of new functions, democracy may be expected to modify even that theory. I fear at least that it would not do away with mosquitoes; possibly not even with reformers.
LV
But I would not be unfair, and I counted many
friends among the Socialists of my town and time
whose best ideals one could gladly share. They were
immensely intelligent, or immensely informed; they
had made a fairly valid indictment against society
as it is organized, or disorganized. But like Mr.
H. G. Wells, who calls himself a Socialist, these exceptions,
in Mr. Wells's words, were by no means
fanatical or uncritical adherents. To them as to
