MICHIGAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTITHESIS OF SOCIALISM. 
BY HERBERT ADOLPHUS MILLER. 
My first socialist was a fellow student in college something like 
fifteen years ago. He was not one of those fully assured, rampant pro- 
pangandist socialists students such as one often meets now. but for 
a New England college he was a good deal of a curiosity. I was most 
interested when he told me about government ownership of railroads, 
for I had a goodly portion of Wanderlust at that time and I was eager 
for any system that promised free rides over the world, and of course 
the more international the area of socialism, the wider would be my 
travels. One of the most awe inspiring facts about solialism as 
it has been developing in these later years lias been its international 
character. Soon after my introduction to the subject, the psychological 
rather than the economic difficulties began to present themselves to 
me. And they still present themselves, for the practical problem of 
socialism is psychological; the economic is quite simple. In the many 
books that one may read about socialism, however, one rarely finds 
any space given to the psychological intricacies involved. Whenever a 
definition of socialism is attempted it fails to be universally satisfying 
because there is still the most important question lurking in the back- 
ground. At a recent meeting of the American Economic Association, 
after a half day’s discussion, it was almost unanimously agreed by the 
members that they did not know what it was, and they were almost 
willing to deny that there was such a thing. Metaphysically I do not 
take kindly to pragmatism, but practically the proof of socialism may be 
discovered in the shaking of the orthodox economic and political order. 
Socialism proposes both a radical change in the distribution of wealth 
and the relationship of men. Tt sounds well to all of us. but the ques- 
tion constantly recurs as to how people will take it. We know how 
they act under existing conditions, but when we make the conditions 
quite different we have no criterion to judge what will happen. We 
might wait and prove the pudding in the eating, but we have a good deal 
of material that might be wasted. We may, however, catch some signs 
along the way which indicate how masses of people will react to whole 
social situations. In those ancient days of social ideas — fifteen years 
ago — I was told that socialism would overthrow individuality, and I 
had to balance this catastrophy against free rides and I confess that 
the attractions of travel diminished. If we were all to have an equal 
share in the world’s goods at the expense of total subordination to 
the political organization there would not be much fun in living. It 
was as hard to come out of my courses in sociology and economics with 
any concession to socialism as it is for a student of economics to 
believe in a high tariff. Time has gone on, and socialism has grown 
from a mere idea to be tremendous factor in world politics, but it has had 
to concede that man shall be allowed some private symbols of indi- 
