It is odd how, to the popular mind, the term "socialism" so often connotes empassioned gentlemen who speak from soap-box platforms and who have no other platforms whatever. The red flag and the harangue had no place with the earliest formulators of socialistic principle. Socialists of the stamp of Russean and Babeux, for instance, saw in their rather visionary conceptions of a commonalty of mankind the most complete amelioration of the social evils that beset France in the 18th century. With the gradual disruption and decay of the French monarchy and the Church in France there had come a surprising shake-up of society on an economic basis. Capital and capitalists became powerful factors in the realm, with a corresponding depression of the lower classes. Socialism as conceived by these early philosophiers was an ideal whose realization would remedy the defects of this system, and as such it has been advocated by leading reformers ever since. It remained for extremists to distort the aims and principles of the idea.

Vagabonds have always been notoriously lazy folk; statute passed in England in the reign of Elizabeth provide compulsory employment for the peripatetic vagrants of the time, and dire punishments for those who refused to work. Today there are no such restrictions, and one who is at best a Student Vagabond may enjoy the priviliges of his order, especially during this unseasonable weather that makes his legs tingle for the hard road beneath them, and the joys of true vagabondage. So the explaining of the course of French socialism in the eighteenth century I shall, with true vagabondish carelessness, leave to Dr. Mason in his lecture in Economics 7b at 10 o'clock today in Emerson F.

Other lectures of interestare:

9 O'clock

"The Child Labor Tax Case," Professor Yeomans, Government 19, Harvard 2.

"The Rise of the Economic Supremacy of Northern Europe", Professor Usher, Economics 10b, Widener N.

11 O'clock

"Byzantine Architecture", Professor Edgell, Fine Arts 1d, New Fogg Museum.