back alley and into all work that is hardest and most dangerous. Society forgets it. The trade unions that should befriend it forget it too. Now comes the I. W. W. with the first bold and brotherly cry which these ignored masses have ever heard."

With no fussy qualifications, this must be granted to the I. W. W. No violence of speech or deed can honorably deprive them of this stirring element in their entreaty. As will be shown later, it is with this that we must learn to coöperate or fail miserably in social duty, and in the best uses of our social experience.

It is again only when we recognize this saving element in the propaganda that we can understand why leaders succeed in making a kind of religion of the general strike. It is because they connect it by intimate association with this over-arching thought of a world brotherhood. As intimately, too, they connect it with the world's waking desire to stop the consenting butcheries of war. Nowhere can we read more uplifting passages against these inhumanities than in syndicalist literature and in the possibility that international brotherhoods of labor may sometime so universally lay down their tools before the threat of war, as to startle the world into some great action against the war infamy.

All this is beyond and above criticism, but these fair dreams are not peculiar to I. W. W. They are shared by millions who bear other names.

Our practical concern is also and largely with things prosaic: with the ways and means through which we are to get possession of the new and regenerated world. Hundreds of differing methods are thrust upon

us for choice and therefore for criticism. It is not merely the general strike, it is even more the manner and spirit of its application.

At a socialist congress in 1891, great enthusiasm was roused by a resolution against the criminal stupidity of war as a means of settling disputes. A Dutch clergyman of great influence was the proposer. "Let us meet the first declaration of war by a general strike," was its purport. Let the workers of the world answer to a man by quietly laying down their tools. Let them reply to the great malefactors, “We work no longer to waste labor and human life, we will only work to save labor and to lengthen and enrich life."

One may gladly believe that somewhere beyond us, a strike may become holy in such a cause. But it is not this with which our average I. W. W. proposals have to do. The strike energy is urged to exercise itself at the heart of our economic activity for a specific purpose. It is not first for political advantages. It is the exclusive economic emphasis which makes the general strike a club for Anarchists rather than for Socialists. Many older Socialists favored the general strike for political ends, while they considered the general economic strike ridiculous. In the pamphlet just quoted the whole idea is that of the Syndicalist. Labor, it says, has now actually got the machinery of production in its own hands. It has only to educate itself to take it and run it. "Only make labor conscious of its possession and the battle is ours." There is a collection of syndicalist opinions on the general strike that appeared in their most im

portant organ, the "Mouvement Socialiste." 1 The entire object is to make labor clearly conscious of its relation to economic power. Wage earners are to be made first to believe it has this power and then to act upon the belief. "The revolution is to be first in the thought, and then in act." To popularize these conceptions is the work of their propaganda. Throughout is the "catastrophic idea."

As many of the revolutionary spirits in Europe and among English Chartists in the days before 1848 were inflamed with hopes of some impending political change, those of this temper are now caught up by beliefs that an economic revolution is at hand. The centralizing forces of present day industry open a new vista to these believers. "We have not now," they tell us, "to worry over the practical difficulties of the 'strike-universal.' We can turn a partial strike into one that has unusual results. To stop transportation alone is to stop a thousand other industries." "With a motion of the hand," says Pataud, "I can make Paris dark as night." It is these mechanical possibilities which have transformed the tactics of "this last great remedy," as a little knowledge of chemistry may give new terrors to sabotage.

This has been the strategy of recent strikes of this character. But-what the believers do not tell us, it has also been the source of their failure. Like Mr. Haywood, Arnold Roller's study of the General Strike turns an indiscriminate mass of historic revolts

1 These opinions are now found in a small volume, La Grève Générale et le Socialisme. See also L'Action Syndicaliste, Griffuelhes, Pp. 27-37.

into instructive material from which labor is to learn its lessons. The Spanish strike in Alcoy in 1874 was not for any added pittance to the wage, but for "the construction of a free society." To be sure, it was at once put down by the troops but it is a part of the great pageant of reconstruction.1

Our American strike for eight hours in 1886 is noticed because politics was ignored and "direct action" substituted. Oddly enough, Roller couples with this a general strike in Belgium in 1893, which met with some success, but it was political in its aim. Nine years later, Belgian socialists rose again, but leaders like Vandervelde and Anseele are blamed by this writer because they call off the use of revolvers. The strike of the Amsterdam dockers in 1903 is called "a brilliant victory," because it began with such high hopes. Its final "failure" was owing to "social parasites," a term he fixes upon socialists who "posted proclamations which declared the strike off," and thus prevented it "from spreading over the whole country and becoming general and consequently was lost." The truth is that a very reckless anarchist leadership frightened the socialist party into a use of its strength to save a situation that had become impossible. It was necessary to reach the farm laborer, who proved to be beyond the reach of the anarchist appeal, though Mr. Roller tells us in the following words how

1 Another general strike to which Syndicalists point is that which silenced scores of industries in Australia and New Zealand in the summer of 1890. Few strikes have been followed by consequences so momentous. It was revolutionary in the strictest sense because it shifted the political powers of the state. It has one advantage over Russian, Spanish, and other obscure strikes which serve as syndicalist patterns, because the facts are much more clearly before us.

they should have proceeded: "Nothing is as contagious and suggestive as rebellion. The farm workers and the poor farmers might imitate the workers of the cities and seize the possessions of great land owners. In recent years it has happened quite frequently that the striking workingmen marched out into the country, in the villages near the cities, enlightened the farmers and won them by saying to them: 'You don't need to pay any more taxes to the state, nor more rents to the landlord, nor more interest to the loan sharks, and to the owners of your mortgages we just burn up all those papers.""

These writers have not even told us a half truth on this subject. As exhibitions of discontent and organized protest, several of them have led to concessions, but their influence in this has been precisely that of any old-fashioned strike. The dramatic event of which so much has been written (the post office strike in France), compelled attention to undeniable grievances, but now that the facts of the "second strike" are known, it is a queer judgment that can see in them "great successes." 1

1 In a contribution just made to the New York Call is a wiser judgment. "Our friends of the I. W. W. have a great deal to say about the general strike. Now, I have seen one general strike in operation. That was in Holland in 1902, and I must say that it somewhat reminds me of the story of the man who was night after night disturbed by a dog howling in front of his house. One night, no longer being able to stand the racket, he ran out in his nightshirt, in spite of the fact that it was bitterly cold, to silence the dog. When he failed to return after an hour his wife went out to look for him. She found him lying full length upon the snow, stiff with the cold, holding on to the dog's tail. 'What in the world are you trying to do?' she asked him. And he answered in a weak voice: 'I am trying to freeze the dog to death.' (Laughter.) Now, when we try to starve the capi