People's Pilot, Volume 2, Number 33, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 February 1893 — LOOKING BACKWARD. [ARTICLE]

LOOKING BACKWARD.

Although the Birth of Nationalism Is of lleceut Date Its Urowth Has Basil Phenomenal. With this number the New Nation enters upon Its third year. Reform journalism is not pecuniarily profitable and ought not to be. If it were, its conductors would be quite too richly rewarded, at least nationalist papers would be; for certainly the dividends in growth and progross declared on our cause during the last two years have been such as to make it seem grasping to suggest the desirability of any.other form of returns. The progress of nationalism since 1890, and still more strikingly if we look back to the first organization of the nationalist propaganda in 1888, has exceeded the most sanguine anticipation of the most sanguine of onr faith. Look back four years and the United States was a practically virgin field for any form of the socialistic propaganda. To-day, nationalism, the name given to the most radical form of socialism, nothing less than- Jesus Christ’s socialism, is a household word from one ocean to another. Four years ago, ridiculed as amiable enthusiasts, people actually fools enough to believe that God’s kingdom of fraternal equality ever could come on earth, the nationalists to-day see their hope become the religion of hundreds of thousands, their practical programme adopted as the creed Of a national party which, having polled a million votes at its first election, in no spirit of idle boastfulness claims the presidency in 1896. Public management of the railroads, the telegraphs, the telephones, the express service, the coal mines, the liquor traffic, the deposit and exchange banking system and of the issue of money, state insurance and the municipalization of all the public services of cities and towns, idsas scarcely heard of four years ago, ms-ny of them not two years ago, have become burning issues before national, state and municipal conventions and at the polls, and nowhere have the nationalists any other opposition to meet than that of* mere inertia. The moral sentiment and the business sense are so absolutely and wholly on their side in every proposition that they have made, that a hearing is all they have needed to ask for. Ridicule was the only weapon that greed and ignorance could use against us from thn start, and that, long since dulled, we are turning against them with newlv whetted edge Our cause is instinctively recognized even by those who have not joined us, as that of all against the few, of the masses against the classes the people against the plutocrats. We have everywhere put the other side on the defensive Can there be any question as to the future of such, a party, which seeks the ideal of Christ by the most hard-headed sort of economic logic? Parties of radical social reform in Europe and Great Britain antedated ours, and until recently it has appeared that America would be a laggard in the glorious race. The prospect has changed of late. America aroused in time to recognize the falsity of its democratic pretensions, will yet be first to touch the goal of true liberty, equality and fraternity.—Edward Bellamy, in New Nation. .