Page 22 - 1912 February - To Dragma

TO DRAGMA OF ALPHA OMICRON PI 87

SOCIALISM

BY JESSIE WALLACE HUGHAN.

Yes, I am a Socialist, and I wonder how many other Alpha girls
are Socialists, too. I know of at least three others among our New
Y'ork alumnae, and I believe that many sisters scattered over the
United States will shake hands with me in spirit as they read these
lines and agree with me that working for Socialism is the most satis-
factory of all the tasks that the twentieth century is thrusting
upon us.

I t is no mere fad, this Socialism of ours, no mere pleasant study to
take the place of the Greek dramas of college days. We must
study, it is true, and study hard, for the world is turning around
very rapidly these days, and as Socialism, with every other living
movement, must keep pace with human development, we find that
like Alice and the White Queen we have to run very fast in order
even to stay in the same place. Yet there is work of another sort,
too, often successful and inspiring, often dull and discouraging,—
speaking to sparse little groups in out-of-the-way neighborhoods,
struggling with dull details of organization and routine business,
answering the misstatments of people who have seen just enough
of the cause to see it all awry. This afternoon for me the work will
be distributing literature,—thrusting circulars into the area-ways
of the unsuspecting citizens while the small boys look on with
interest from the street-corner. There are joys, also,—the delight of
feeling ourself in the vanguard, of hearing the talk of those leaders
who, though the world does not yet know their names, are shaping
the policies of the future, and of watching the steady uprising of
the mighty tide of human brotherhood that is to undermine poverty
and political corruption together.

Shall I try to tell you in a few words what socialism is? I t would
be useless, were it not for two things,—first that I know many
of you are already Socialists at heart, filled with disgust at the in-
justice of capitalism and ready to exchange it for any other system
of whose practicability you could be convinced, and second that what
I am writing will be at the most a suggestion for you to think and
study on Socialistic lines.

Here is the attempt, Socialists believe that the cause of modern
poverty and the many ills arising from it, is the fact that at the pres-
ent day the means of production, land, machinery and raw material,
are the private property of one class of people, the capitalists, while
the actual labor of production is performed by another set of people,