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and suspended in conspicuous places through the park: "Wise men form judgment of the present from the past." –Sophocles.
"I confirm it as my conviction that class law, placing capital above labor, are more dangerous to the republic at this hour than the chattel slavery system in the days of its haughtiest supremacy."—Abraham Lincoln.
A. R. Parsons, being introduced, said that as the committee of arrangements had left it to him to select his own subject, he had chosen the Social Revolution as the topic for discussion.
It was well known he was an Anarchist, said the speaker. He asked their attention to a few of the many reasons why not only himself but others should sooner or later become revolutional. Social science or Socialism, said the speaker, teaches us how to understand or explain facts; how to point out analogies, and thus discover the operations of natural law. To understand the science of life we must learn the history of the human race, and by its past understand the present. The history of men, in all its evolutions and revolutions, was simply the manifestation of their economic or material condition. Production, and next to production the distribution o wealth, forms the basis of all moral, intellectual, and social progress and order. In all historical epochs we find that the distribution of the products of labor and the social grading into castes and classes were in strict accordance with the mode of production and that of exchange. Hence the primary cause of all social changes and political revolutions must not be sought in the heads of man, or in the growing enlightenment and conception of eternal truth and justice, but in the changes that took place in the modes of production and exchange. They must not be sought in the philosophy, but rather in the economy, of their representative epoch; therefore, the growing conviction that the existing social institutions are unreasonable and unjust, are simply the explanation of the fact that the methods of production and exchange have undergone changes until they can no longer be made to apply to a social order which grew up under entirely different economic conditions. The existing social order has outgrown its usefulness, if it ever had any, and for proof we point to the poverty of the great mass of the people, which has now become unendurable. What is this social
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