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 itself.  And having acquired relative protection in their private property, small though it might be, they were unwilling to permit something which were it to succeed would lose them their all.

Now with some exceptions every human being is a “protectionist,” provided he does possess anything at all which protects him and which is therefore worth being protected by him in turn.  The trade unionist, too, is just such a protectionist.  When his trade union has had the time and opportunity to win for him decent wages and living conditions, a reasonable security of the job, and at least a partial voice in shop management, he will, on the relatively high and progressive level of material welfare which capitalism has called into being, be chary to raze the existing economic system