Ernest Crosby, Garrison the non-resistant

[98] fruitless; which does not prevent them, however, from laboring and sacrificing themselves for the cause, like the typical idealist. This belief and this behavior is strangely like the Christian doctrine of predestination, the certain triumph of the church, and the fore-ordained election of the saints, which has never interfered with the missionary activity of believers. The disciple of Marx comforts himself with the materialist equivalent of the statement that all things work together for good, and his dogmatism is as strict as that of any Presbyterian sect. It is the old issue of fatalism and free will, the fatalist usually exerting himself to secure his ends much more strenuously than his adversary.

The most complete application of this theory of economic causes to the subject of slavery has been made by an acute socialist thinker, Mr. A. M. Simons, in a series of articles in the International Socialist Review of Chicago during the year 1903. According to him the idealism of Garrison and the Abolitionists — the growing belief in the immorality of slavery and the justice of the demand for freedom, John Brown and his raid, Uncle Tom's Cabin, the battle songs of the North-all these things were phantasmagoria