e words of Cecil
Rhodes, the United States would be enabled to scab without let or
hindrance on Europe, while England, as professional strike-breaker and
policeman, destroyed the unions and kept order.

All this may appear fantastic and erroneous, but there is in it a soul of
truth vastly more significant than it may seem. Civilization may be
expressed today in terms of trade-unionism. Individual struggles have
largely passed away, but group-struggles increase prodigiously. And the
things for which the groups struggle are the same as of old. Shorn of
all subtleties and complexities, the chief struggle of men, and of groups
of men, is for food and shelter. And, as of old they struggled with
tooth and nail, so today they struggle with teeth and nails elongated
into armies and navies, machines, and economic advantages.

Under the definition that a scab is _one who gives more value for the
same price than another_, it would seem that society can be generally
divided into the two classes of the scabs and the non-scabs. But on
closer investigation, however, it will be seen that the non-scab is a
vanishing quantity. In the social jungle, everybody is preying upon
everybody else. As in the case of Mr. Rockefeller, he who was a scab
yesterday is a non-scab today, and tomorrow may be a scab again.

The woman stenographer or book-keeper who receives forty dollars per
month where a man was receiving seventy-five is a scab. So is the woman
who does a man's work at a weaving-machine, and the child who goes into
the mill or factory. And the father, who is scabbed out of work by the
wives and children of other men, sends his own wife and children to scab
in order to save himself.

When a publisher offers an author better royalties than other publishers
have been paying him, he is scabbing on those other publishers. The
reporter on a newspaper, who feels he should be receiving a larger salary
for his work, says so, and is shown the door, is replaced by a reporter
who is a scab; whereupon, when the belly-need presses, the displaced
reporter goes to another paper and scabs himself. The minister who
hardens his heart to a call, and waits for a certain congregation to
offer him say $500 a year more, often finds himself scabbed upon by
another and more impecunious minister; and the next time it is _his_ turn
to scab while a brother minister is hardening his heart to a call. The
scab is everywhere. The professional strike-bre