of
the Mississippi, the iron mines of Michigan and Minnesota, the mines
and forests of Idaho, Montana, Colorado, Washington, and Oregon, and the
fields of California and Arizona. They prefer to winter in the cities,
but, as their only refuge is the bunk lodging house, they increase the
social problem in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and other centers of
the unemployed. Many of these migrants never were skilled workers; but a
considerable portion of them have been forced down into the ranks of the
unskilled by the inevitable tragedies of prolonged unemployment. Such
men lend a willing ear to the labor agitator. The exact number in this
wandering class is not known. The railroad companies have estimated that
at a given time there have been 500,000 hobos trying to beat their way
from place to place. Unquestionably a large percentage of the 23,964
trespassers killed and of the 25,236 injured on railway rights of way
from 1901 to 1904 belonged to this class.

It is not alone these drifters, however, who because of their
irresponsibility and their hostility toward society became easy victims
to the industrial organizer. The great mass of unskilled workers in
the factory towns proved quite as tempting to the propagandist. Among
laborers of this class, wages are the lowest and living conditions the
most uninviting. Moreover, this group forms the industrial reservoir
which receives the settlings of the most recent European and Asiatic
immigration. These people have a standard of living and conceptions of
political and individual freedom which are at variance with American
traditions. Though their employment is steadier than that of the
migratory laborer, and though they often have ties of family and other
stabilizing responsibilities, their lives are subject to periods
of unemployment, and these fluctuations serve to feed their innate
restlessness. They are, in quite the literal sense of the word, American
proletarians. They are more volatile than any European proletarian,
for they have learned the lesson of migration, and they retain the
socialistic and anarchistic philosophy of their European fellow-workers.

There were several attempts to organize casual labor after the decline
of the Knights of Labor. But it is difficult to arouse any sustained
interest in industrial organizations among workingmen of this class.
They lack the motive of members of a trade union, and the migratory
character of such workers deprives their