CHAPTER I.
THE CAPITALIST REFORM PROGRAM Only that statesman, writer, or sociologist has the hearing of the public to-day who can bind all his proposed reforms together into some large and far-sighted plan.
Mr.Roosevelt, in this new spirit, has spoken of the "social reorganization of the United States," while an article in one of the first numbers of _La Follette's Weekly_ protested against any program of reform "which fails to deal with society as a whole, which proposes to remedy certain abuses but admits its incapacity to reach and remove the roots of the other perhaps more glaring social disorders." Some of those who have best expressed the need of a general and complete social reorganization have done so in the name of Socialism.

Mr.J.R.
MacDonald, recently chairman of the British Labour Party, for example writes that the problem set up by the Socialists is that of "co-ordinating the forces making for a reconstruction of society and of giving them rational coherence and unity,"[9] while the organ of the middle-class Socialists of England says that their purpose is "to compel legislators to organize industry."[10] Indeed, the necessity and practicability of an orderly and systematic reorganization in industrial society has been the central idea of British Socialists from the beginning, while they have been its chief exponents in the international Socialist movement.

But the idea is equally widespread outside of Socialist circles.

It will be hard for British Socialists to lay an exclusive claim to this conception when comrades of such international prominence as Edward Bernstein, who holds the British view of Socialism, assert that Socialism itself is nothing more than "organizing Liberalism."[11] Whether Socialists were the first to promote the new political philosophy or not, it is undeniable that the Radicals and Liberals of Great Britain and other countries have now taken it up and are making it their own.

Mr.Winston Churchill, while Chairman of the Board of Trade, and Mr.Lloyd George, Chancellor of the Exchequer, members of the British Cabinet, leaders of the Liberal Party, recognize that the movement among governments towards a conscious _reorganization of industry_ is general and demands that Great Britain should keep up with other countries.
"Look at our neighbor and friendly rival, Germany," said Mr.Churchill recently.