r ethical
generalization, it is the cause of vast inaccuracy and sad injustice.
American syndicalism is not a scheming group dominated by an
unconventional and destructive social philosophy. It is merely a
commonplace attitude--not such a state of mind as Machiavelli or
Robespierre possessed, but one stamped by the lowest, most miserable
labor-conditions and outlook which American industrialism produces. To
those who have seen at first-hand the life of the western casual
laborer, any reflections on his gratitude or spiritual buoyancy seem
ironical humor.

"An altogether unwarranted importance has been given to the syndicalist
philosophy of the I.W.W. A few leaders use its phraseology. Of these
few, not half a dozen know the meaning of French syndicalism or English
guild socialism. To the great wandering rank and file, the I.W.W. is
simply the only social break in the harsh search for work that they have
ever had; its headquarters the only competitor of the saloon in which
they are welcome. . . .

"It is a conventional economic truism that American industrialism is
guaranteeing to some half of the forty millions of our industrial
population a life of such limited happiness, of such restrictions on
personal development, and of such misery and desolation when sickness or
accident comes, that we should be childish political scientists not to
see that from such an environment little self-sacrificing love of
country, little of ethics, little of gratitude could come. It is
unfortunate that the scientific findings of our social condition must
use words which sound strangely like the phraseology of the Socialists.
This similarity, however, should logically be embarrassing to the
critics of these findings, not to the scientists. Those who have
investigated and studied the lower strata of American labor have long
recognized the I.W.W. as purely a symptom of a certain distressing state
of affairs. The casual migratory laborers are the finished product of an
economic environment which seems cruelly efficient in turning out human
beings modeled after all the standards which society abhors. The history
of the migratory workers shows that, starting with the long hours and
dreary winters on the farms they ran away from, or the sour-smelling
bunk-house in a coal village, through their character-debasing
experience with the drifting 'hire and fire' life in the industries, on
to the vicious social and economic life of the winter unemploy