can forget the astounding effect it had on the complacency
of the public. Very little was revealed that any well-informed social
worker does not know as a commonplace about the mill population. The
wretchedness and brutality of Lawrence conditions had been described in
books and magazines and speeches until radicals had begun to wonder at
times whether the power of language wasn't exhausted. The response was
discouragingly weak--an occasional government investigation, an
impassioned protest from a few individuals, a placid charity, were about
all that the middle-class public had to say about factory life. The
cynical indifference of legislatures and the hypocrisy of the dominant
parties were all that politics had to offer. The Lawrence strike touched
the most impervious: story after story came to our ears of hardened
reporters who suddenly refused to misrepresent the strikers, of
politicians aroused to action, of social workers become revolutionary.
Daily conversation was shocked into some contact with realities--the
newspapers actually printed facts about the situation of a working class
population.

And why? The reason is not far to seek. The Lawrence strikers did
something more than insist upon their wrongs; they showed a disposition
to right them. That is what scared public opinion into some kind of
truth-telling. So long as the poor are docile in their poverty, the rest
of us are only too willing to satisfy our consciences by pitying them.
But when the downtrodden gather into a threat as they did at Lawrence,
when they show that they have no stake in civilization and consequently
no respect for its institutions, when the object of pity becomes the
avenger of its own miseries, then the middle-class public begins to look
at the problem more intelligently.

We are not civilized enough to meet an issue before it becomes acute. We
were not intelligent enough to free the slaves peacefully--we are not
intelligent enough to-day to meet the industrial problem before it
develops a crisis. That is the hard truth of the matter. And that is why
no honest student of politics can plead that social movements should
confine themselves to argument and debate, abandoning the militancy of
the strike, the insurrection, the strategy of social conflict.

Those who deplore the use of force in the labor struggle should ask
themselves whether the ruling classes of a country could be depended upon
to inaugurate a program of reconstruction