tual to this
use, the miners and others followed. From this it is still a far cry to
the role of such intellectuals as Sidney and Beatrice Webb, G.D.H. Cole
and the Fabian Research group in England, who have really permeated the
British labor movement with their views on labor policy. However, there
is also a place for the American intellectual as an ally of trade
unionism, not only as its paid servant. The American labor movement has
committed a grave and costly error because it has not made use of the
services of writers, journalists, lecturers, and speakers to popularize
its cause with the general public. Some of its recent defeats, notably
the steel strike of 1919, were partly due to the neglect to provide a
sufficient organization of labor publicity to counteract the anti-union
publicity by the employers.

FOOTNOTES:

[106] This assumes that the legislative program of labor would deal
primarily with the regulation of labor conditions in private employment
analogous to the legislative program of the British trade unions until
recent years. Should labor in America follow the newer program of labor
in Britain and demand the taking over of industries by government with
compensation, it is not certain that the courts would prove as serious a
barrier as in the other case. However, the situation would remain
unchanged so far as the difficulties discussed in the remainder of this
chapter are concerned.

[107] For the control of the national government and of the forty-eight
State governments.

[108] Such as a state of war; see above, 235-236.

[109] See above, 203-204.

CHAPTER 15

THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT AND TRADE UNIONISM

The rise of a political and economic dictatorship by the wage-earning
class in revolutionary Russia in 1917 has focussed public opinion on the
labor question as no other event ever did. But one will scarcely say
that it has tended to clarity of thought. On the one hand, the
conservative feels confirmed in his old suspicions that there is
something inherently revolutionary in any labor movement. The extreme
radical, on the other hand, is as uncritically hopeful for a Bolshevist
upheaval in America as the conservative or reactionary is uncritically
fearful. Both forget that an effective social revolution is not the
product of mere chance and "mob psychology," nor even of propaganda
however assiduous, but always of a new preponderance of power as between
contending economic