njustly they may
feel to have been treated by the employers or the government; however
slow they may find the realization of their ideals of collective
bargaining in industry; their stakes in the existing order, both
spiritual and material, are too big to reconcile them to revolution. The
truth is that the revolutionary labor movement in America looms up much
bigger than it actually is. Though in many strikes since the famous
textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1911, the leadership was
revolutionary, it does not follow that the rank and file was animated by
the same purpose. Given an inarticulate mass of grievously exploited
workers speaking many foreign tongues and despised alike by the
politician, the policeman, and the native American labor organizer;
given a group of energetic revolutionary agitators who make the cause of
these workers their own and become their spokesmen and leaders; and a
situation will clearly arise where thousands of workmen will be
apparently marshalled under the flag of revolution while in reality it
is the desire for a higher wage and not for a realization of the
syndicalist program that reconciles them to starving their wives and
children and to shedding their blood on picket duty. If they follow a
Haywood or an Ettor, it is precisely because they have been ignored by a
Golden or a Gompers.

Withal, then, trade unionism, despite an occasional revolutionary facet
and despite a revolutionary clamor especially on its fringes, is a
conservative social force. Trade unionism seems to have the same
moderating effect upon society as a wide diffusion of private property.
In fact the gains of trade unionism are to the worker on a par with
private property to its owner. The owner regards his property as a
protective dyke between himself and a ruthless biological struggle for
existence; his property means liberty and opportunity to escape
dictation by another man, an employer or "boss," or at least a chance to
bide his time until a satisfactory alternative has presented itself for
his choice. The French peasants in 1871 who flocked to the army of the
government of Versailles to suppress the Commune of Paris (the first
attempt in history of a proletarian dictatorship), did so because they
felt that were the workingmen to triumph and abolish private property,
they, the peasants, would lose a support in their daily struggle for
life for the preservation of which it was worth endangering life itse