THAT which many feared has actually come to pass. Through one of the most extraordinary cases of political manoeuvring the Socialists were placed in power by the Liberals, acting under Mr Asquith’s guidance. This is not the first time this statesman has misled his followers, but it may be the last. If the situation thus created were purely political we would take nothing to do with it in these pages, but as it has brought us face to face with Socialism in power, it is well our readers should realise what has happened. It gives us no heart-searchings, if that was all, that men who worked in the mine and at the carpenter’s bench, etc., are now to act as the King’s counsellors and shape the policy of the British Empire. Neither does the fact that there are among the men now in power those who are possessed with sound judgment and an estimable character (though there are others of a very different stamp) allay our fears when we sit down to calmly consider what is meant by the political creed they preach in season and out of season. The root idea of Socialism is not simply the reformation of the existing order of things; it is much more drastic than that; it aims at the complete overturning of present conditions; it is in other words revolution—a revolution which the saner Socialists wish to be bloodless, but which the extremists will have, no matter how much blood will be shed. Its theory of the body politic is not simply academic: Socialism is intensely practical, and means to put its theory into practice wherever it can. Socialism has stressed the rights of the workman and left unstressed his duty. It is for this reason that Socialism has so largely captured the working classes of the country, and by its fair promises of an earthly Eden it has turned their eyes from that vast waste and howling wilderness of Russia, strewn with the wreckage of a thorough-going Socialism to a Promised Land not yet attained. But the most serious aspect of Socialism is its attitude to the Christian religion. Here the leaders of Socialism have spoken with no uncertain sound. To quote Marx, whose writings have done so much to foster the Socialistic theory:—”The idea of God must be destroyed; it is the keystone of a perverted civilisation.” Belfort Bax is no less outspoken:—”It is useless blinking the fact,” he says, “that the Christian doctrine is more revolting to the higher moral sense of to-day than the saturnalia of the cult of Proserpina could have been to the conscience of the early Christians.” To all this it may be replied that this is the language of extremists, and that the Labour Party now in power is not the same as Communism, and that after all there are Christian Socialists. But thorough-going Socialists at once say that Christianity and Socialism are contradictory. If that be so it may be asked have we not Socialism in the community of goods enjoyed by the early Christians after Pentecost? To which we answer, No; because (1) the selling of all they had sprang from love to the Lord Jesus; (2) it was not compulsory; (3) it was not made binding as a rule on other Christians who did not give up their goods voluntarily. Christianity aims at the good of the individual by regeneration; Socialism aims at his good by improving his position in this world—a very praiseworthy thing in itself, but wofully and hopelessly defective when regeneration is left out of account. In a short article like this we cannot treat the subject with the thoroughness it deserves, but we would utter a word of warning to our readers in the Highlands to be on their guard against giving support to glib-tongued, itinerant orators who promise them all sorts of blessings, but carefully keep in the background the principles they have at heart. What has happened in Russia, where Socialism had its golden opportunity, ought to be sufficient warning to wise men. And the conduct of the Glasgow “wild men” in our own land should have a sobering effect on those who see in Socialism a golden future like the Millennium itself.