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THE WISCONSIN IDEA

socialists in Germany for many years were opposed to the whole plan of industrial insurance and only recently have accepted it. So far does this plan of expediency go, that one time when the writer happened to remark to a socialist member that a proposed plan to extend credit, by means of a well known European device so that workingmen might possess a little property, was not really socialism, the member replied with a smile, "It is an excellent bill and good enough socialism for us."

The socialists are looking abroad and putting forth well tried experiments, mixed in many cases it is true with their peculiar propagandist ideals, which because of their source, excite a blind and unreasoning opposition. If our people would give more study to great economic movements in other lands they would realize this truth.

So marked have been the changes throughout the world and so astonishing the fact that they have actually seemed to have increased prosperity, that the conservative Boston Transcript is compelled to remark in a recent editorial on England:—


"Take all together, this makes an astounding program of social improvement, all the more astounding in the fact that it should have been undertaken by the staidest of all governments. This marks a really stupendous innovation in governmental procedure. Our friends, the socialists, have always been ridiculed for their pet claim that it is the business of the government to spread happiness and plenty among the people. Yet here, in a country